Something heavy was brewing over St. Patrick’s Day in altcoin exchange markets.

Among the top 10 altcoins by market cap, the 2nd biggest money maker for the 7 days ending Mar. 20 was LINK (with +10%). But Toncoin’s name-checked out this week. TON rallied a massive +37%.

Toncoin (TON) is the native currency for the popular Telegram messaging app for OS, Windows, and Android.

Toncoin Explained in 60 Seconds

Meanwhile, Dogecoin was doing the downward dog pose the week ending Friday, Mar. 21. DOGE posted -3% gains for the 7-day period. And Cardano was making the world work better for ADA short sellers.

The Layer-1 smart contract platform’s native ADA tokens were trading down by -5.3% for the week. At the same time, Solana was trading -3.76% below its level a week earlier.

Overall, Bitcoin’s price flatlined for the week, and its market share among altcoins fell by 70 basis points. So what was Toncoin’s price running on this week as traders piled up TON?

The following five signs played well in crypto markets over the week.

1. French Govt Returns Telegram Founder’s Passport

The French government arrested Telegram’s founder and CEO, Pavel Durov, last August.

France wanted to investigate Durov over alleged crimes committed by third-party users of his company’s Telegram app. Toncoin prices dropped 20% in 12 hours.

But this month, markets learned that the government had returned Durov’s seized passport and allowed him to leave the country. TON skyrocketed 20% in a matter of minutes upon finding the news.

2. Heavy Hitting VCs Invest $400M in TON

Durov’s release by the authorities in France was a huge morale booster and positive publicity for Toncoin. But, the Layer-1 smart contract platform also made big strides on the business front over the same calendar stretch.

Meanwhile, as Toncoin’s founder left France safely, markets were thrilled to learn of a $400 million investment round in TON by several high-tech venture capitalists.

Backers included Sequoia Capital, Ribbit, Benchmark and Kingsway, and Draper Associates, the TON Foundation announced in a press release.

The gigantic allocation means strong long-term support for Toncoin prices because it hogs up a big chunk of TON’s limited supply of 5.13 billion tokens.

3. Lower Fees, TON Supply Squeeze in March

In addition to a big legal win and a big business win the same week, Toncoin on-chain metrics showed favorable activity on the TON network.

Average transaction and storage fees paid by users daily, for example, rolled back from 15,145 TON on Feb. 25 to 6,295 by Mar. 25, according to data from TONStat. So it’s a cheap time to use the network.

Meanwhile, the network’s growth in on-chain activated wallets continued apace along a steady incline from February.

The network also saw a slowdown in new supplies as daily growth in TON validator rewards remained unchanged from December’s levels following a year of marked growth.

4. Classic Fib Bounce From 34% of Last ATH

This March was a perfect storm for a Toncoin rally delivering alpha ROI that technical chart analysts may have been able to anticipate on the basis of one popular trade signal.

The Fibonacci retracement levels are a technical analysis tool based on the historical record of markets’ tendency to reverse overbought/oversold trends around percentage gains/losses that line up with the Fibonacci ratios commonly found in sets of organized data and throughout nature.

On Mar. 12, around a price of $2.74, TON began to rally from months of losses since its historic all-time high of $8.08 on Jul. 2, 2024. That was near a price level, almost exactly 34% of the ATH price.

34 is the tenth number in the classic Fibonacci sequence.

5. Telegram App Notches 1 Billion Active Users

Meanwhile, as Toncoin approached the sometimes predictive Fibonacci retracement line, the app ecosystem bagged another enormous win in addition to the VC funding round and Durov’s release by French authorities.

The popular Telegram social messaging app crossed the impressive milestone of 1 billion active users. Durov celebrated by posting beef with rival app WhatsApp on his Telegram channel. Markets continued to go wild for Toncoin.

“Ahead of us stands WhatsApp — a cheap, watered-down imitation of Telegram,” the mobile app and cryptocurrency entrepreneur wrote.

“For years, they’ve desperately tried to copy our innovations while burning billions on lobbying and PR campaigns to slow us down. They failed. Telegram grew, became profitable, and —unlike our competitor — retained its independence.”

Durov also highlighted that Telegram’s parent company made $547 million in profits last year.

TL;DR

• Binance traders hopping on the XRP bandwagon have been highly bullish with their positions lately, perhaps driven by the conclusion of Ripple’s legal case against the SEC.
• However, is too much positive sentiment around a volatile cryptocurrency necessary good news for it?

Popular crypto analyst Ali Martinez outlined earlier today the substantial change in the number of long positions for XRP on the world’s largest exchange. As the graph below demonstrates, the longs have grown significantly within the span of just a day and currently represent more than 72% of all futures positions on Binance.

72.28% of traders with open $XRP positions on Binance Futures are leaning bullish! pic.twitter.com/yFOxjTEnd1

— Ali (@ali_charts) March 23, 2025

As with all things in life, this data could be reviewed from both sides. First, we can speculate that perhaps a portion of these investors could know something we don’t or anticipate a big development on the horizon. Such could be a potential approval of an XRP ETF in the States, which might have an immediate positive impact on the asset’s price.

Or, maybe they expect XRP’s value to rise sharply after Ripple’s CEO, Brad Garlinghouse, announced earlier this week that the case against the SEC has concluded with a favorable ending for the company.

This indeed had an immediate but brief impact on XRP’s price, which jumped from $2.3 to $2.6 but then retraced to the current $2.4. Additionally, it brought debates about whether it was another classic ‘sell-the-news‘ event.

The second perspective we can discuss from the growing number of longs on Binance Futures is much more bearish. After all, remember Warren Buffett’s wise words: buy when others are fearful and sell when they are greedy.

The crypto analytics platform Santiment has also warned multiple times in the past that cryptocurrencies tend to do the opposite of what the crowd expects. Consequently, XRP could actually go for a correction soon, which would have an even more profound and painful effect if it leads to a cascade of liquidated long positions.

In the fourth quarter, Helium’s native token, HNT, saw a 20% quarter-over-quarter (QoQ) decline in circulating market capitalization, falling from $1.3 billion to $1.0 billion. The token’s price dropped by 22%, decreasing from $7.54 to $5.88.

Despite the market downturn, the Helium network continued expanding.

Growth in Hotspot Adoption

According to Messari’s report, Helium Mobile saw its number of hotspots grow by 14% QoQ, reaching 24,800 from 21,800. Helium Mobile’s unlimited plans remain significantly cheaper than the three-figure costs typical of US telecom providers.

The service also introduced the Discovery Mapping feature, rewarding users in HNT for sharing location data. However, since February 4, these incentives have shifted to Cloud Points, a change expected to be detailed further in the Q1 report.

Beyond growth in adoption, Helium Mobile demonstrated its utility during Hurricane Helene in North Carolina at the end of September. Messari revealed that while the disaster left many without electricity and water, Helium hotspots remained operational, providing 5G coverage. The team also distributed emergency kits, including Starlink devices, to support affected communities.

Helium’s IoT network also expanded in Q4, with hotspots growing by 20% QoQ. Since the network’s migration to Solana in early 2023, 33,000 hotspots have been onboarded, several thousand of which were contributed by gamers. This brought the total number of hotspots to over 375,000, up from 342,000 pre-migration. However, while infrastructure growth has been rapid, demand has not yet matched supply, as per the data analytics company’s findings.

Data Credits (DCs) are used to cover onboarding fees – such as the $10 cost to register a hotspot – but data transfer usage remains low, with daily DC burns limited to a few hundred dollars. As a result, Helium has successfully deployed LoRaWAN connectivity infrastructure but has yet to generate significant network demand.

Past Controversies

Helium’s founders and associates allegedly hoarded a significant portion of early token rewards. According to CryptoPotato’s report back in 2022, insiders were claimed to have mined millions of HNT tokens, worth $250 million at its peak, while the public was left with a fraction.

During the same period, Helium faced backlash after claiming Lime, the rideshare company, as a key client. Helium stated that Lime used its service to geolocate e-scooters. The partnership was highlighted on its website and in media coverage. However, Russell Murphy, Lime’s Global Communications Director, clarified that the relationship was limited to a 2019 test.

Prior to this, Cloud computing giant Salesforce Salesforce also denied any partnership, which prompted Helium to remove their logos.