Chain choice is a distribution decision more than a technical one. Here is how the three main options actually compare when you are building a consumer product.
TON
Pick it if: your product lives inside Telegram. The wallet is already in the user's messenger, onboarding friction is near zero, and that advantage is enormous for consumer apps.
The pain: the asynchronous message model is genuinely different from EVM and will break your mental model at least twice. Tact has improved things a lot but the ecosystem tooling is still thinner than Ethereum's. Expect to read source code where you would expect docs.
Solana
Pick it if: you need throughput and cheap transactions — trading, gaming, high-frequency anything. The performance is real and the DeFi liquidity is deep.
The pain: the account model requires you to think about rent, PDAs and account sizing up front. Rust/Anchor has a steeper curve than Solidity. And you will spend real time on priority fees and transaction landing reliability during congestion.
EVM
Pick it if: you need the deepest tooling, the largest developer pool, the most audit firms, and composability with existing DeFi. On L2s, fees are no longer a serious objection.
The pain: fragmentation. "EVM" now means twenty chains and your users are on the wrong one. Bridging is still a bad experience and a security liability.
The honest recommendation
If your distribution is Telegram, build on TON — the onboarding advantage outweighs every tooling complaint. If you are building a trading product, Solana. For everything else, an EVM L2 gives you the most support when things go wrong.
And it is fine to start on one chain. Multi-chain from day one is how small teams ship nothing.
