TON Korea Interview: 2025 NFT/DeFi Innovation via Telegram+AI

Draft title: "TON Releases Roadmap for the First Half of 2025... Accelerating Global Expansion through Collaboration with Telegram"

@Mark This content covers various cryptocurrency and blockchain elements, including TON's network scalability and DeFi. I believe your extensive knowledge of the cryptocurrency and blockchain market is essential for this.

Let's start the analysis.

TON (The Open Network) blockchain platform has unveiled a new roadmap targeting the first half of 2025, with a core focus on network scalability and integration into the real economy through various plans. This aims to expand in the fields of decentralized finance (DeFi), NFTs, and digital payments. Particularly notable is the collaboration with Telegram, which is expected to rapidly expand its global user base. Additionally, TON has shown strong intent to leverage the environment of Korea, which is becoming a crypto hub.

In TON's global hub strategy, there was a special emphasis on the Korean market. Birchnut, who currently leads TON Korea Hub, mentioned in an interview the importance of the Korean market, stating that Korea ranks highly globally in crypto adoption and is rapidly developing with a sophisticated user base. This background makes it an optimal environment to maximize the synergy between TON and Telegram.

The main contents of the 2025 first-half roadmap include network scalability, improvement of the developer environment, and user base expansion through various partnerships. They plan to support the growth of dApps and services by upgrading the TON Virtual Machine (TVM) and improving the usability of the development toolkit (SDK). Additionally, they aim to rapidly expand the TON ecosystem through further accelerator programs.

Through close collaboration with Telegram, TON plans to experiment with integrating payment functions and AI agent (bot) services within the messenger. Birchnut evaluated Telegram as a hub where people actually gather, work, and communicate, forecasting an emerging digital ecosystem where AI agents participate in Telegram group chats to handle tasks and execute payments. The Telegram AI bot integrated with TON can open wallets, transfer tokens, and issue assets like NFTs, expected to open a new frontier of the 'AI agent economy'.

TON Foundation has already introduced payment solutions that can connect to the real economy, and plans to enhance payment possibilities through collaborations with various companies. The Visa debit card launched through TON Hub supports major cryptocurrencies including USDT (Tether). These efforts aim not only to increase DeFi trading volume but also to expand actual cryptocurrency usage in daily transactions.

With former TON Foundation CEO Stephen Yoon founding a new venture capital (VC), active investments in blockchain projects are anticipated. With approximately 150 billion KRW worth of investment funds, projects within the TON ecosystem are likely to gain traction. Birchnut added that this is good news for project builders in the Korean market as it increases opportunities for collaboration with TON.

In conclusion, the TON network aims to achieve automated contracts, payments, task distribution, and more through collaboration with Telegram and integration with AI agents. The first-half 2025 roadmap will serve as a pivotal role in achieving these goals, clearly demonstrating TON's vision for an innovative ecosystem blending NFTs, DeFi, payments, and AI.

Mark, I would like to provide some feedback after reviewing the analysis materials.

First of all, you explained the roadmap and strategy of the TON blockchain platform very well overall. I was particularly impressed by how you emphasized the collaboration with Telegram in a way that makes it easy for readers to understand. However, there are a few areas that need supplementation.

First, it would be good to provide additional data in the explanation of the Korean market. While it is interesting that the level of cryptocurrency adoption in the Korean market is high, adding more concrete information to support this would help make it more credible to readers. For instance, include data such as "the growth rate of cryptocurrency users in Korea or market share of major platforms." Of course, please ensure to verify the accuracy of this information.

Second, please provide a more detailed explanation of the practical benefits that the integration of TON and Telegram offers to users. Readers are curious about how specific features or benefits will actually affect them. For example, adding specific examples on "how the payment feature within Telegram is expected to be used and what convenience it will offer in daily life" would be beneficial.

Third, more explanation about the role and functions of the AI agent is needed. A clearer description of how the AI agent will operate within Telegram is necessary. For instance, provide detailed explanations on "how the AI agent will perform tasks in group chats and the benefits that can be obtained from this."

In conclusion, supplementing these three areas will make the article more complete. It seems like only three pieces need to be fixed. Please refer to this for your writing. I trust you understand.

Here are the questions translated into English:

1. First, this article is well written. You have thoroughly covered many aspects of it. Shall we review a few important points together?
2. First, the summary sentence is logically and concisely written, making it appropriate. The part, "TON unveils its 2025 roadmap and announces the expansion of the physical economy and digital payments," encapsulates the key content well.
3. Second, the flow between paragraphs is naturally connected. The first paragraph announces the roadmap disclosure, then it emphasizes the Korean market, explains the key points of the roadmap, links to specific technical elements and partnerships, and concludes with unique elements such as collaboration with Telegram and AI agents. The flow is very logical. Also, the conclusion that includes collaboration with Telegram and AI agents in the final part is nicely wrapped up.
4. This article is approved for finalization. For the imagery work, let's request it from @olive.
5. @olive, please prepare the representative image for the article.