3 Top altcoins gaining traction while everyone watches Ethereum
If your watchlist begins and ends with ETH, you’re missing what TON, SOL and NEAR are building, and people are using.
Ethereum always seems to get the spotlight, but not all the action. If you’ve only been watching ETH pump and fizzle, you’ve missed a few serious moves in the altcoin trenches. We found three tokens making real plays, not just memes and vibes.
Traction doesn’t tweet. It shows up on-chain.
Toncoin [TON] | Everyone’s favourite messaging app is now a wallet
While people were busy forwarding deepfake voice notes about “new coin launches”, Telegram was rolling out a self-custody wallet inside its app, and it's tied to Toncoin.
The platform crossed a billion monthly active users this year, and now it’s onboarding regular humans into crypto whether they know it or not.
The app lets users pay, swap, and stake without ever needing a seed phrase, and that’s how normal adoption happens, without scary interfaces or fake MetaMask pop-ups.
Telegram didn’t just add a wallet. It put crypto in the same chat you use to argue about the Springboks’ scrum. That’s distribution, scale, and how ecosystems win.
South Africans can get TON through major exchanges that accept ZAR deposits, like Binance, which currently offers local bank support and P2P trades. The price as of this week? About R58 to R61 per TON, depending on where you buy and whether the fees slap you on the way out.
Solana [SOL] | High-speed, high-traffic, high-functioning
Solana’s not new, but it’s not slowing down either. Average daily users across H1 were between 3 and 6 million, with spikes above 7 million. Independent network tests have already pushed past 100,000 transactions per second, and we’re not talking lab conditions. These were real mainnet stress tests.
It’s one thing to say “our chain is fast”. It’s another thing to get dApps using it and not falling over when people actually show up. Solana has both.
For all the ‘ETH killer’ headlines, Solana became a throughput machine with actual usage to back it, and hat’s not merely just a pitch, it's based on real data.
SOL trades in South Africa on VALR with a direct ZAR pair, which means you don’t have to mess around with USDT conversions or wait for transfers from some dude named Kelvin in Gauteng who insists on using PayPal. At the time of writing, SOL is trading in the R3,400 to R3,600 range, so maybe don’t lose your Ledger today.
NEAR Protocol [NEAR] | No one likes bridging
While the rest of crypto is obsessed with Layer 2s, NEAR’s building tools that make all of that invisible. One login, cross-chain access, and app-like UX, which is all possible with NEAR’s chain abstraction tools.
It’s working. NEAR recently clocked over 46 million monthly active users, putting it ahead of pretty much every other L1 except Solana. Developers are also experimenting with AI agents that can execute transactions on your behalf, like “send gasless stablecoin top-up if my wallet hits R100”. None of this is theoretical; it’s already demoed.
The average person doesn’t want a multichain wallet. They want the thing to work and not break. NEAR is building exactly that, and people are showing more interest.
NEAR is available on Luno and global platforms that serve South African users. It’s currently trading at around R44 to R47, and for those doing the mental math, that means R500 gets you 10 - 11 NEAR before fees. It’s not 2021 prices, but it’s not meme coin roulette either.
A few quick things to check before you yeet your ZAR
- Use licensed platforms: The FSCA is licensing crypto platforms in SA. Check the official list before signing up.
- ZAR rails matter: Fees for converting ZAR to USDT then to a coin are real. Local pairs exist (like SOL/ZAR on VALR), and go direct where you can.
- Not everything trending is trustworthy: Just because a coin is moving doesn't mean it's going somewhere useful. Always check dashboards like Messari, Artemis, or The Block for real-time traction.
If Ethereum is the blue-chip everyone watches, these three are the ones getting things done in the background. Telegram is shipping TON to normies. Solana is chewing through volume like it’s built for it. NEAR is making multichain useable. The rest? Still trying to fix their Discord links.
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