Teams building a new protocol frequently ask the same question: should we launch on TON or Ethereum? It's a real choice with material consequences for development costs, community reach, and long-term liquidity. This comparison is practical, not promotional. We operate on TON and we believe in the chain — but "believe in TON" is not a useful answer to a decision that affects your project for years.
Here's an honest side-by-side look at the key factors that actually matter for a token launch in 2025.
Transaction Costs
TON: Transaction fees on TON are extremely low — typically fractions of a cent for standard transfers and a few cents for complex contract interactions. During high-traffic periods, fees remain stable due to TON's sharding architecture, which scales by adding more shards rather than by competing for block space through fee auctions.
Ethereum mainnet: Gas costs on Ethereum mainnet have ranged from a few dollars to over $50 per transaction depending on network congestion. Token launch events — which involve high transaction volumes from many participants simultaneously — often coincide with elevated gas costs. A participant paying $30-50 in gas to participate in a $200 allocation is a bad user experience that directly suppresses participation.
Ethereum L2s (Arbitrum, Optimism, Base): Layer 2 solutions bring Ethereum fees down to cents, comparable to TON. But they introduce bridging complexity and liquidity fragmentation. A project launching on Arbitrum is competing for participants who need to bridge ETH from mainnet first — additional friction.
Verdict: TON's fee structure is clearly better for high-participation launches where per-transaction cost affects participant behavior. Ethereum mainnet is at a significant disadvantage. Ethereum L2s are competitive on cost but add bridging friction.
Transaction Finality
TON: Transaction finality on TON is approximately 5 seconds under normal conditions. For a token launch event with thousands of participants completing allocation transactions simultaneously, fast finality reduces the risk of congestion-related failures and makes the user experience predictably fast.
Ethereum: Post-merge Ethereum achieves finality in approximately 12-15 minutes (2 epochs). For individual transactions, this is often not noticeable — confirmations appear quickly. But for the smart contract perspective in a time-constrained IDO, true finality timing matters for settlement mechanics.
Verdict: TON's finality speed is meaningfully better and directly benefits IDO participation mechanics.
Developer Tooling
TON: The TON development ecosystem has improved significantly since 2023. Blueprint (the official development framework), the TON SDK, and the Tact language (a higher-level alternative to FunC) have lowered the barrier considerably. Documentation is better than it was but still lags behind Ethereum's years of community-built resources. Finding experienced FunC/Tact developers is harder than finding Solidity developers.
Ethereum: Ethereum's developer ecosystem is the largest in blockchain by almost any measure. Hardhat, Foundry, OpenZeppelin, and a decade of Stack Overflow answers make Solidity development more accessible than any other chain. The tooling is mature, battle-tested, and well-documented. Audit firms have deep Solidity expertise. The talent pool is deep.
Verdict: Ethereum wins on developer tooling by a significant margin. For projects that need to move fast with an existing Solidity-fluent team, TON's tooling gap is a real cost.
Community and Distribution
TON: Telegram's 900 million monthly active users represent a distribution channel that no other blockchain can access natively. TON wallets are integrated into Telegram's interface. Participants who might never install MetaMask can receive and hold tokens through Telegram Wallet. For projects that are building mass-consumer applications, this distribution advantage is extremely significant.
Ethereum: Ethereum's community is the largest and most experienced in the space. DeFi culture, NFT culture, and institutional crypto all center on Ethereum. The capital concentration on Ethereum and Ethereum L2s is substantially higher than on TON. For projects targeting experienced DeFi users with significant capital, Ethereum's community is a stronger fit.
Verdict: Different audiences. TON wins on distribution breadth and consumer accessibility; Ethereum wins on capital depth and experienced user concentration.
DEX Liquidity Depth
TON: STON.fi and DeDust together represent meaningful DEX liquidity, but total TVL on TON DEXes is around $600M as of late 2025. Individual trading pairs for new tokens can be thin, particularly in the first weeks after launch. The 94% liquidity retention rate we achieve at Tonstarter requires deliberate LP bootstrapping — it's not automatic.
Ethereum mainnet and L2s: Uniswap and its equivalents on major L2s have vastly deeper liquidity. A token launching with the same LP size in relative terms will have more absolute price stability on Ethereum simply because the underlying pool infrastructure is deeper and more active.
Verdict: Ethereum has deeper DEX liquidity. TON projects need more deliberate liquidity management at TGE.
Regulatory Positioning
TON: Operating on TON, particularly through a VARA-aligned launchpad like Tonstarter based in DIFC, provides a clear regulatory context. UAE/DIFC is an established jurisdiction for digital asset services with defined compliance requirements. TON's non-US-facing profile has also reduced SEC enforcement attention compared to Ethereum-based projects.
Ethereum: The SEC's treatment of Ethereum's native token as a commodity (not a security) has provided some clarity. But ERC-20 tokens launched on Ethereum are still subject to aggressive SEC enforcement scrutiny. Several major IDO platforms have restricted or exited US markets entirely due to enforcement risk.
Verdict: Both chains face regulatory complexity. TON's positioning through VARA-aligned operators provides a cleaner compliance pathway for projects that don't need US retail participation.
The Decision Framework
Consider TON if: your target users are consumers who already use Telegram; fee-sensitive participation is critical; you're building a product that needs Telegram mini-app integration; or you want early-mover advantage in a growing but not yet saturated ecosystem.
Consider Ethereum (mainnet or L2) if: your target participants are experienced DeFi users with significant capital; you have a Solidity-fluent team that would face high switching costs; cross-chain composability with existing DeFi protocols is critical; or capital depth at launch matters more than distribution breadth.
Consider both if: your architecture supports it and you have the resources to execute well on two chains. The fragmentation cost is real, but some projects genuinely need both audiences.
We built Tonstarter because we believe in TON's specific advantages for a specific type of project. But it's not the right choice for every project, and pretending otherwise wouldn't serve teams making this decision. Questions? [email protected].
