What is Pontoon (TOON) crypto coin? The full story behind the failed cross-chain project

Pontoon (TOON) is a cryptocurrency token built for a simple idea: make moving money between blockchains as easy as clicking a button. Launched in October 2021, it promised to fix a real problem in DeFi - liquidity stuck on separate chains like Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain, or Polygon. But today, nearly four years later, Pontoon is a ghost. Its token trades for less than two-millionths of a dollar. Its market cap is under $500. And no one is talking about it.

What Pontoon was supposed to do

Pontoon Finance wasn’t trying to be another meme coin. It was built as a liquidity mirroring protocol. That means instead of moving tokens from one chain to another (like most bridges do), it would create a copy of your asset on the target chain while locking the original. Think of it like leaving your car at home and renting an identical one at your destination - same function, no need to transport the real thing.

This approach avoided the biggest risk in cross-chain transfers: custodial bridges. Most bridges hold your funds in a smart contract until they’re released on the other side. If that contract gets hacked, your money is gone. Pontoon claimed to eliminate that risk by using a decentralized network of validators who didn’t hold your assets - they just verified transactions using Proof-of-Stake.

The token, TOON, had three jobs:

• Pay validators for securing the network
• Reward liquidity providers who supplied assets to the pools
• Let holders vote on protocol upgrades

It was designed as an ERC-20 token on Ethereum, which made it easy to list and track. The team raised $3.93 million in funding from seed, private, and public sales. At its peak, TOON traded at $0.33. That’s over 17,000 times what it’s worth today.

What happened to Pontoon?

The theory made sense. The execution didn’t.

By early 2023, the market started showing signs of trouble. Trading volume dropped to pennies. Liquidity pools dried up. Validators stopped participating because there was no incentive - no one was using the protocol. Without users, there were no fees. Without fees, validators left. Without validators, the network became unsafe. It was a death spiral.

Today, TOON trades at around $0.0000189. That’s a 99.99% drop from its all-time high. Its market cap? $449. For comparison, the entire cross-chain bridge market was worth over $1 billion in 2023. Pontoon accounted for less than 0.00004% of it.

There’s no active development. No team updates. No blog posts since 2022. No GitHub commits. No Discord or Telegram channels with more than a handful of members. No Reddit threads. No YouTube tutorials. No news coverage. No one is writing about it because there’s nothing to write about.

Even CoinGecko, which lists over 20,000 tokens, shows zero social followers for TOON. Zero. That’s not a small community - that’s a dead project.

Why did it fail when other bridges succeeded?

Pontoon wasn’t the only cross-chain project in 2021. Multichain, Synapse, and Wormhole were also launching. But they had one thing Pontoon didn’t: adoption.

Multichain integrated with over 30 blockchains and partnered with major DeFi apps. Synapse became the go-to bridge for arbitrage traders. Wormhole was backed by Solana’s ecosystem and used by protocols like Serum and Phantom.

Pontoon had no partnerships. No integrations. No wallets supported it. No DEXs listed it beyond one obscure exchange. It was a beautiful idea trapped in a vacuum.

The team also failed to build community trust. There were no AMAs, no roadmap updates, no transparency about how the validator network was growing. When the bear market hit in 2022, investors didn’t stick around to wait - they moved on.

What’s the current state of TOON?

As of November 2025, here’s the real picture:

• Price: $0.0000189
• Market Cap: $449
• Circulating Supply: 23.5 million TOON
• Total Supply: 100 million TOON (fixed, no mining)
• 24-Hour Volume: $49,100
• Exchanges: 1 (unlisted on Binance, Coinbase, Kraken)
• Price Change (1 year): -97.55%
• Price Change (all-time): -99.99%

The fully diluted valuation (FDV) - what the project would be worth if all 100 million tokens were in circulation - is just $1,900. That’s less than the cost of a used laptop. It suggests the market believes the remaining 76.5 million unissued tokens will never be released… or if they are, they’ll be worthless.

Is TOON worth buying or investing in?

No.

Not because it’s a scam - the code might still work. But because there’s no demand. No liquidity. No users. No team activity. No reason to believe it will ever recover.

If you bought TOON at its peak of $0.33, you’ve lost 99.99% of your money. If you bought it at its ICO price of $0.18, you’re down 99.99%. Even if the entire crypto market surges again, Pontoon has no infrastructure, no community, and no momentum to ride that wave.

It’s not a speculative play. It’s not a long-term bet. It’s not even a gamble - it’s a tombstone.

What can you learn from Pontoon?

Pontoon’s collapse isn’t just a story about one failed token. It’s a lesson in crypto.

Great tech doesn’t save bad projects. Pontoon had a solid architecture. But without users, partnerships, and communication, it was dead on arrival.

Market demand beats theoretical elegance. No one needed a one-click liquidity mirror when they could use a bridge that actually worked.

Community is non-negotiable. If no one is talking about your project, it doesn’t exist.

Don’t chase high APYs from unknown tokens. Many people bought TOON early because of promised staking rewards. Those rewards vanished when liquidity dried up.

If you’re looking at a new crypto project today, ask yourself: Who’s using this? Who’s building on it? Who’s talking about it? If the answer is “no one,” then it’s not a coin - it’s a ghost.

Where is Pontoon now?

No one knows for sure. There’s no official shutdown notice. No GitHub archive. No Twitter post saying “we’re done.” It just faded out.

Some think the team disappeared. Others think they ran out of funds. A few speculate the project is in limbo, waiting for a bull market that never comes.

Either way, TOON is no longer a functional part of DeFi. It’s a footnote in crypto history - a reminder that even the most technically sound ideas can vanish if they don’t connect with real people.