TAC Attracts $150M to Bring Ethereum-based Liquidity to Telegram’s TON Blockchain

TAC and the Turtle Club have raised $150 million in just two weeks as part of a campaign to bring Ethereum-based liquidity to the TON blockchain and ultimately to one billion Telegram users.

The Turtle Club, a decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol designed to democratize liquidity access, is coordinating The Summoning, a campaign to raise liquidity for TAC ahead of its mainnet going live, which is scheduled for mid-May. It said it raised its first $100 million in just one week.

The goal is to help attract DApps to build on TAC, which allows Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) based DApps to gain access to the TON blockchain, the exclusive blockchain infrastructure provider of Telegram that is not EVM-compatible. TAC is a Layer 1 blockchain with a TON adapter.

It has already attracted DApps like decentralized exchange (DEX) Curve Finance and lending protocol Morpho, among others, said Marco Monaco, co-founder and growth lead of TAC.

Distribution is Key

“Everything that is successful in DeFi, it’s because they have distribution,” Monaco told The Defiant over Google Meet. “If you look at Base, there is Coinbase distribution; if you look at BNB Chain, it’s because of the Binance distribution.”

By building on TAC, DApps gain access to TON, and through it to Telegram’s one billion users, he said.

“Bringing DeFi, bringing crypto to these people is just one click away,” Monaco said. “If you use Telegram, you’ll just need one click to start using DeFi, to start generating yield, or to start using a DEX. The distribution is massive.”

Democratizing Liquidity Provision

While TAC’s developers did go on a roadshow to woo big whales and liquidity providers, they wanted to broaden their reach, so they worked with Turtle Club to create The Summoning, which is trying to “democratize” the process of providing liquidity.

“Today, when you need liquidity, you engage with big whales or big liquidity providers (LP). You ask them to deploy liquidity on your product or on your network, and in exchange, you provide them some token allocation or some incentives,” Monaco said.

“This is a game purely done with private deals, backroom deals and things like this. The idea with Turtle Club is basically to create a marketplace and make it cross-brand, so that basically everyone can get access and tap into the same opportunity as the big whales,” he added.

Turtle Club offers liquidity providers a flat 3.4 TAC tokens per $1,000 locked, with no providers getting special incentives. Monaco highlighted that the project is non-dilutive as liquidity providers always know how many tokens they’ll have at the end of the campaign.

There are currently 1,295 unique depositors who have locked 20 different cryptocurrencies into The Summoning vaults.

Curve founder Michael Egorov is one of them, having deposited 583 ETH ($930,000) on April 16.

“The real reason to deposit, though, is to support bootstrapping the vision of bringing solid EVM-based DeFi to TAC and help TON this way. I believe it could help to bring some yet untapped market towards DeFi,” wrote Egorov on X.

Bringing DeFi to TON

The Turtle Club’s single-asset vaults remain on Ethereum and will gradually expand to TON-native vaults, a TAC spokesperson said.

That lets liquidity providers keep their funds on the Ethereum blockchain, while making sure the project has sufficient liquidity from day one.

“When we go to [DeFi teams] and say, ‘Hey, are you interested in getting live on Telegram?’ most of them were already trying to go live on Telegram, but this was continually postponed because TON is not EVM. So, for teams like Morpho or Curve, going live on TON means rebuilding everything from scratch.”

TAC aims to eliminate that need.

Disclaimer: This story has been updated to correct the first name of TAC's co-founder.