Tonswap

Context

After five years building decentralized finance products in the Polkadot ecosystem, SORA Wallet, Polkaswap, Fearless Wallet, our team at Soramitsu turned its attention to where the users actually are: Telegram.

The Open Network (TON) sits in a unique position in crypto. It's the exclusive blockchain for Telegram Mini Apps, giving it native access to over 1 billion monthly active users — a distribution channel no other chain can match. With 1.5 million monthly active wallets, 30K+ new wallets created daily, and 500+ million Telegram Mini App MAU, TON represents the most realistic path to mainstream DeFi adoption that exists today.

Soramitsu has spent six years perfecting the art of building user-friendly DEXes and crypto wallets. Tonswap is the opportunity to take everything we've learned and apply it to an ecosystem with genuine mass-market reach.

The Challenge

Build a comprehensive DeFi platform, token swaps, concentrated liquidity provision, yield farming, and a project launchpad, and make it feel as natural as chatting with friends. All within the constraints of a Telegram Mini App.

The core tension: concentrated liquidity is powerful but notoriously complex. On platforms like Uniswap v3, providing liquidity requires understanding price ranges, tick spacing, impermanent loss, and active position management. Most users don't, and shouldn't have to. Yet the efficiency gains of concentrated liquidity are too significant to leave on the table.

The design question wasn't whether to include these features. It was how to make them accessible to the kind of user who discovered crypto through a Telegram game.

Approach

Drawing on six years of DeFi design experience

This wasn't our first time turning complex blockchain mechanics into clean mobile UX. We'd solved similar problems across Polkaswap, SORA Wallet, and Fearless Wallet. Every UX pattern, every onboarding insight, every edge case we'd encountered over six years fed directly into Tonswap's design.

The difference this time: we are designing for an audience that might never have used a DeFi app before. TON's user base skews toward Telegram-native users who came into crypto through gaming and social features, not through MetaMask and Etherscan. The UX bar wasn't just "better than other DEXes." It was "intuitive to someone who's never provided liquidity in their life."

Making concentrated liquidity feel like common sense

The biggest UX challenge — and the design work I'm most proud of, is the liquidity provisioning flow. Concentrated liquidity (CLMM) is genuinely difficult to understand. Most DeFi platforms throw users into a chart with draggable range selectors and expect them to figure it out.

We took a fundamentally different approach: a guided, step-by-step onboarding flow that translates technical concepts into everyday language.

• ·Step 1: Pool Your Tokens "Your funds go to work, similar to an investment account, and you earn a share of swap fees whenever someone makes a trade."
• ·Step 2: Pick Your Price Band "Define the range where you'll earn fees. Narrow bands earn more when price stays inside — but can stop earning if price moves out."
• ·Step 3: Choose Your Strategy Instead of mathematical parameters, we offer three named strategies: Conservative, Balanced, and Aggressive.
• ·Step 4: Re-Center & Manage "If price drifts out of your band, tap Re-Center to move your band back around current price."
• ·Step 5: Earn Fees & Rewards Confirmation of what you'll earn and how boosting works.

This five-step onboarding turns what is typically a 15-minute tutorial into a 60-second guided flow. The illustrations, featuring playful AI-generated cat characters, reinforce the approachable tone without undermining the seriousness of the financial mechanics.

Brand identity: native but distinct

I created the Tonswap visual brand with a deliberate strategic approach: Tonswap needed to feel like it belonged in the TON ecosystem, visually native, immediately recognizable as a TON product, while maintaining its own identity.

The design language draws from TON's established palette (blues, teals, clean geometry) but introduces subtle differentiators: molten liquid-metal effects, glassmorphic depth treatments, and luminous gradient accents that give Tonswap a slightly more futuristic, premium edge. Both dark and light modes were designed from the ground up, each with carefully calibrated treatment of the glassmorphic and gradient elements.

Key Design Decisions

Telegram-native information architecture

The app is structured around five primary tabs — Wallet, Earn, Swap, Launch, and More, each representing a core user intent. The Swap function sits at the center with the Tonswap logo as the tab icon, making the primary action impossible to miss.

Transparent risk communication

Every earning feature comes with prominent "How it works?" and "Risk Notice" buttons. The risk notice explains impermanent loss in plain terms, uses bold text for critical concepts, and includes a "Swipe to Permanently Hide" interaction that ensures users have consciously acknowledged the risks before dismissing.

Cross-chain architecture made invisible

Under the hood, Tonswap connects to the SORA network via 2-way bridges, accesses third-party blockchains (Ethereum, Solana), routes through DEX/CEX aggregation, and uses price oracles and liquidity arbitrage. None of this complexity surfaces in the user interface. Users select two tokens, see a rate and a route, and tap Swap.

What's Next

Tonswap is currently in pre-launch with an active community building through the MeowFi Telegram game. The product is positioned to launch into a TON ecosystem with 1+ billion Telegram users and an exclusive blockchain partnership that means every Telegram Mini App runs on TON. The total addressable user base is orders of magnitude larger than anything we designed for in the Polkadot ecosystem.

Why This Project Matters

Tonswap represents the culmination of six years of learning. Every design decision carries the scar tissue of problems we solved, and mistakes we made, across SORA Wallet, Polkaswap, and Fearless Wallet.

This time, the ecosystem has the users. A billion of them. The design challenge is making sure the product is ready when they arrive.