- Toncoin fees will fall sixfold to a fixed $0.0005 within days
- Catchain 2.0 has already increased TON network throughput tenfold
- Most TON transactions are set to become free under the new roadmap
- TON's price is down roughly 57% year-to-date despite the upgrades
Toncoin is preparing to cut transaction fees roughly sixfold, with a longer-term plan to eliminate charges on most operations entirely. The new base fee, set at 0.00039 TON (approximately $0.0005), will not fluctuate with network congestion, a meaningful departure from the variable pricing that complicates cost planning across competing chains.
TON founder Pavel Durov outlined the changes during a recent roadmap presentation that followed the rollout of Catchain 2.0, the protocol’s latest consensus upgrade.
Fee Cuts Built on a Technical Foundation
Catchain 2.0 has already expanded network throughput tenfold, giving engineers room to strip out the congestion premium previously embedded in the base fee. Durov confirmed that the majority of transaction types will eventually incur no fees, with only a narrow category of operations remaining subject to charges.
The competitive context is instructive. Ethereum fees swing between $1 and $10 during peak demand; Bitcoin’s layer-one costs typically run $0.50 to $5. Solana keeps baseline costs low but has seen fees spike sharply under load.
A fixed rate of $0.0005 and a prospective zero-fee model for routine transactions would position Toncoin (TON) among the industry’s cheapest settlement layers, particularly for micro-payments and in-app transfers.
Telegram’s 950 Million Users Frame the Opportunity
The fee economics carry specific weight given TON’s deep integration with Telegram. Near-zero costs are a prerequisite for in-app tipping, sub-$10 cross-border transfers, and creator monetization tools, use cases that Telegram has signaled it intends to build across its nearly 1 billion monthly active users.
Removing that friction point could prove transformative for small-value, high-frequency transactions that traditional payment rails handle poorly.
Whether markets reward the execution is another matter. The price of Toncoin has fallen roughly 57% year-to-date and has traded largely flat since last month’s updates, even as the network logged measurable gains in speed and capacity. Analyst Ruslan Khairullin attributed the persistent price weakness to broader market conditions and the typical lag between technical delivery and user-level adoption.
Several additional roadmap milestones remain, most of which are tied to the formal launch of the feeless transaction layer. Transaction volume, settlement speed under stress, and network load distribution will be the metrics that matter most as TON attempts to translate infrastructure progress into real adoption.
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