Ton Foundation airdrops $600,000 to NFT traders and holders

• Active NFT traders and holders across Ton NFT marketplaces between April 11 and 23 are eligible for the airdrop.
• Ton aims to boost its on-chain metrics through the Open League airdrop campaign.
• Ton is down 2.2% on Thursday despite airdrop announcement.

Ton (TON) announced an airdrop worth $600,000 to NFT traders and holders within its network in an effort to continue spurring growth within its ecosystem. This comes as TON's on-chain metrics fall behind compared to other top smart contract blockchain networks.

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TON airdrop is aimed at spurring growth within its network

The Ton Foundation continued its incentive program to attract users on Thursday after announcing an airdrop of $600,000 worth of TON tokens to NFT traders and holders. The airdrop was targeted at active traders and holders on Ton's NFT marketplaces Getgems, xRare and TonDiamondsNFT.

According to an announcement on X, Ton said it had already taken the snapshot, and active traders across the above marketplaces between April 11 and April 23 were eligible for the airdrop. The airdrop distribution criteria would be based on points earned from activities, including the number of NFT collections traded, total NFT trading volume and number of NFT deals performed.

The airdrop follows earlier airdrops from Ton's Open League campaign, which aimed to boost activity within its blockchain ecosystem. For example, the Ton Foundation airdropped $120,000 worth of TON tokens to holders and traders of top tokens in The Open League's hackathon on Wednesday. Following this, Ton also reduced fees by 2.5x to continue attracting users.

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These efforts are important since despite Ton's meteoric rise to break into the top 10 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization, its on-chain metrics remain weak. Its total value locked of $156.56 million and on-chain trading volume of $8,484 is quite tiny compared to other top smart contract blockchains, according to data from DeFiLlama. Hence, Ton may be doubling down on integrations and reward programs to improve activity within its network.

In the past week, Ton has also partnered with Telegram and Tether to allow users of the social media platform to send and receive the USDT stablecoin for free.

Read more: Correction: TON price hits new all-time high amid Telegram-related hoax

TON is trading at $5.53, down 3.3% at the time of writing.