Over that time, the densest part of the map has organically formed around this zone. People place themselves near the symbolic Durov. Nobody asked them to. It just happened.

My name is Max. It’s a pseudonym — I’ve been working under it in crypto for five years, and that’s how it’ll stay.

Right now, 2,067 people have paid for pixels on my map.

I don’t have a team. I used to — five people. Now I work alone. I pay for the servers out of my own pocket. A year ago I stopped taking any money from the project. And for the last twelve months I’ve been topping up the community rewards pool from my personal funds — because the project’s income isn’t enough yet to pay users back at the level I want to pay them.

Not because I’m a hero. When TON dropped from eight dollars to one and a half, the only right move was to direct money to users. As rewards for minimum activity.

What’s below — an idea I picked up in 2005. Three failures over 22 months. How I became a TON Foundation hackathon semifinalist without spending a single dollar on marketing. And new big zones on the map dedicated to specific crypto moments.

Where I come from

In 2021 I launched NearPunks — the first NFT-punk collection on the NEAR blockchain. 10,000 NFTs, 9,000 sold in three months. NEAR’s official X account follows NearPunks — they curate their follows strictly. Then NEAR crashed. But I still maintain the project.

The idea for TonMap came in December 2023. I thought about the Million Dollar Homepage — the 2005 site where British student Alex Tew sold a million pixels at a dollar each to pay for university. Every person who works in IT knows this story. The site is still alive. Half the links are dead — but it stands. Digital time in a bottle.

I wanted to build something like it. Not a copy. An ecosystem. A canvas for Telegram and TON. Every pixel locked into a smart contract, forever. On a pixel you can build a page, place links, talk about yourself or your project, build an identity. Not advertising — a cultural artifact. Although advertising too.

When I was conceiving TonMap, TON was at $2–3. A million pixels at 1 TON each — that’s two to three million dollars. For me this was never money “for the pocket.” I planned, and still plan, to put most of it back: into rewards, into development, into expansion.

Launch

January 2024 — I started building. Team of five. Name — Notpixel. In February we renamed to TonMap. In May we opened the presale — 60 to 70 people grabbed 1,000 to 1,500 pixels. On June 6, 2024 we opened to everyone. I remember sitting and refreshing the counter every ten minutes. And of course watching the transactions, the bugs, fixing them on the fly.

Eight months after our rename, Notcoin launched their own project under the same name — Notpixel. On September 28, 2024, a bid came in on the Fragment auction for my unused username @not_pixel — $592, from a Notcoin co-founder. I didn’t accept it.

A few months after launch we broke into the Open League Hackathon — a major hackathon by the TON Foundation, with a $2.28 million prize pool. Out of 1,200 projects, 157 made it to the semifinals. We were among them. Then came the offline events in different cities. We couldn’t miss that. Folks from our community and team showed up at offline meetups across various cities — and it was great.

At one of the meetups there was a funny moment. A TON Foundation representative said after our pitch: “A million pixels for Telegram is too few, the audience is huge.” We answered — we get it, that’s scarcity, and that’s cool. The idea stays. Exactly one million pixels.

On November 29, 2024 we were included in the TON Ecosystem Roundup — a post in the official Toncoin channel (8.3 million subscribers). 323,000 views. TonMap was listed as one of the four key projects of the TON ecosystem that month. Two weeks later, on December 12, @ton_blockchain followed us — the official TON Foundation X account. 2.3 million followers, and they only follow about a thousand accounts.

In October of that same year, the MyTonWallet team reached out to me — one of the main wallets for TON. They were looking for a different project, and my contact got to them by mistake. I could have closed the chat — it wasn’t my project. Instead I offered to connect and collaborate. They agreed. Before New Year’s they announced the integration of TonMap into their Explorer — millions of users go through it. I allocated them a 2,500-pixel zone. We still work together to this day.

Where things are now

22 months after launch. May 2026.

24,696 pixels are now taken. If you put them all into one square — you get 157 by 157 pixels. 17,000 TON of real volume has passed through the project. This money sits in the fund for community payouts (staked + payouts from partners).

2,067 unique wallets have bought a pixel. More than 10,000 transactions. 2,000+ active users per month. 950+ people created TonMap Pages — a free Web3 alternative to Linktree, right inside Telegram (and on the website): links, NFT showcase, Telegram Gifts, statistics, donations in TON.

The Telegram channel has 300,000 subscribers, X has 22,000. Part of the audience came in through cross-promo in 2024, so the actual active audience is smaller — that’s normal for projects that went through the task-trading phase in Telegram.

The pixel price is hardcoded into the smart contract: 1 TON. The final 5,000 pixels cost 5 TON each. The price doesn’t change. Only the TON price moves. At launch a pixel cost $4–5. Now it’s around two. This is a chance for users — a chance to buy in cheaper than ever.

The map’s website, by the way, is tonmap.app — you can also find Pages there, the product I mentioned. There will be more over time. The WebApp and other links are below.

What you get for 1 TON:

- A spot on the map — locked into the smart contract, nobody can erase or take it.

- A free TonMap Page— a Web3 page with an NFT showcase, links, donations in TON. Normally that kind of thing costs a subscription. Here it’s free.

- PIX — internal points that accumulate and exchange for TON at a fixed rate of 2,000 PIX = 1 TON. This isn’t a 1,000% APR. This is a slow return of your investment back to break-even.

- A share in Phase 4 — when the map is fully sold out, the smart contract will begin distributing the fund’s profits monthly between the holders. Passive income in TON, hardcoded, for years.

Three failures

Now, about what didn’t work.

First — cross-promo through tasks. The standard mechanic in Telegram: I do a task for a partner, the partner does one for me. Sounds reasonable, in reality — a disaster. People came for a single click. One in ten thousand actually bought a pixel. Visibility yes, sales no.

Second — a 10% referral program. On NearPunks it worked beautifully — we paid out $13–14k to referrers, paid back many times over. On TonMap it didn’t work. Not because of the program — there just wasn’t critical mass of audience. The program is still live, by the way: 10% in TON drops to the inviter.

Third — counting on user-generated content. I thought: people will buy pixels, they’ll have “their own place,” they’ll start writing about the project, sharing. Didn’t work. Same reason — not enough reach to trigger the organic effect.

The root of all three — the same thing. Marketing. I didn’t reach the millions. There wasn’t enough budget or connections to make the idea go viral the way Tew’s press release did in 2005. This article is part of the fix, part of a new approach that should address it.

Why I didn’t quit

Did I think about quitting? No. But there was a stretch of mild apathy — TON dropped from $8 to $1.50 and isn’t planning to bounce back. The team gradually drifted away. People have lives, somebody got a family, someone moved to other projects. No fights. Just life. I took it with understanding.

I’d open the admin panel, look at the numbers in dollars — five times less than at launch. I’d think: what the hell am I doing.

But quit — no. When you launch a project, people come to you. They trust you. They pay money. If five people are on a project — you have to work on it. And I have a whole crowd.

A year ago I was left alone. I decided: I’m taking no money from the project. All money goes to the fund, and from there to the people. Right now there’s 17,000 TON in it. It’s user money that will come back to them through the rewards system.

I pay for servers and domain out of pocket. Marketing too. And for the last year I’ve been topping up the community payout pool from my personal funds. The project’s income — 9 TON per week. That’s not enough to pay users what I want to pay them. So I top it up from other projects.

In the first year of work, the whole team — five of us back then — took out 900 to 1,000 TON in total from the project. At various exchange rates that’s three to five thousand dollars for everyone combined. Most of it went to the designer, developer replacement, servers, and so on. Few crypto founders would agree to work on those terms. Usually teams take 30–50% of revenue right away. I’m the opposite example.

Why. I watched 99% of NFT collections die after 2021. I watched 99% of crypto projects die after the 2022 hype. Most went through a token launch with pump-and-dump. Teams collected money and disappeared. That’s deception. That’s not how projects and communities are built.

There will be no token on TonMap. I made this decision a year ago too, even though the team advised otherwise. Tokens are manipulation and false expectations. A huge part of the scam and the negativity in the industry is tied to them. PIX in TonMap is not a token — it’s internal points for refunding investments. 2,000 PIX = 1 TON. Break-even per pixel.

History District — points of gravity on the map

At launch I placed a special zone almost at the center of the map — 2,500 pixels. I labeled it “Fragment” — a reference to fragment.com, Telegram’s auction platform for usernames. I tied the zone to Pavel Durov’s public TON wallet address. Durov doesn’t know — I did it unilaterally as a tribute. If he ever comes in and connects his wallet, he can manage that zone however he wants.

Over 22 months the densest part of the map organically formed around that zone. People place themselves next to the symbolic Durov, as if they want to be part of that piece of history.

And I thought it was a good idea — that I could highlight a few more important entities. That’s how I came to the idea of three new zones. To Durov’s Fragment zone I’m adding new tribute zones. The first — Million Dollar Homepage, in honor of Alex Tew. Without his 2005 project, my 2024 project wouldn’t exist. The second — in honor of the first Bitcoin block, which started the entire cryptocurrency. The third is still undefined — for now it temporarily holds Spotty, Durov’s dog from his VKontakte days.

The MDH zone — 2,500 pixels, will never be sold. Inside, clickable elements: a link to the original milliondollarhomepage.com, the date August 26, 2005, facts about how 21-year-old Tew sold a million pixels in five months and made a million dollars. Right now it’s just a zone, but I’ll add additional functionality. It’ll be interesting.

In twenty years, the zone will still be there.

Bitcoin Genesis Block— January 3, 2009. 2,500 pixels. A memorial zone for the first Bitcoin block, which launched the entire crypto industry. Inside — the famous phrase from The Times of that day (“Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks”), which Satoshi Nakamoto sealed into the genesis block. The block hash. The date. This zone is also not for sale.

These aren’t pixels. This is a museum of internet culture inside Telegram, on the blockchain. Every generation of digital artifacts gets a permanent place. A gravity point for new pixels.

zen apps and projects built around it.

And then what? Phase Four. The smart contract begins distributing the fund’s profits monthly between all landowners. The higher the land tier, the larger the share. This isn’t “buy a pixel” anymore — it’s a passive reward in TON that flows on its own. It works not because I promised. It works because it’s hardcoded into a contract that nobody, including me, can change.

And one more thing. TonMap can technically outlive both TON and Telegram. The map lives as a website at tonmap.app. In the extreme case it can be frozen as a static HTML page and dropped on any host or decentralized storage / blockchain. Every pixel stays in place. Every owner’s name — forever. But I’m planning to develop the project further, to add new features and applications.

By the way. In parallel with TonMap, I’m building TonMap Pages, TonMap Academy, an NFT-tracker. All of it tied to one idea — no tokens, no airdrops, just products I’d want to see in crypto myself. All in one ecosystem. The start has been made.

For twenty-two months I quietly built. No paid PR. No bought influencers. No token under hype. I haven’t taken a salary from the project for a year. And I won’t, while so little is sold. Giving to the community — that’s the right call. I received validation from the TON Foundation, from MyTonWallet, from 2,067 people who trusted me with their money. And I’ll keep building.

TON is currently around $2. When it returns to $5–7 — a pixel becomes 2–3 times more expensive in dollars. This is an entry window that closes at the next bull run.

Alex Tew has been holding his website for 20 years. I plan to hold TonMap longer.

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Map: [tonmap.app]

Telegram bot/webapp: [t.me/thetonmapbot]

Telegram channel: [t.me/tonmap]

X: [x.com/thetonmap]

Press contact: max@tonmap.app