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Price (USD)
$5.45Circulating Supply
$2.5519BVolume (24h)
$290.0669MMarket Cap
$13.9208BLow/High 24h
$5.27 - $5.50Change (24h)
$0.077304Crypto projects come in all shapes and varieties. Sometimes, even abandoned blockchains are revived and they go on to become popular. This happened to TON, a once hyped crypto project that was the brainchild of Pavel Durov, the developer and owner of the popular Telegram app.
In early 2018, Telegram raised $1.7B in a private token sale to develop a blockchain named the Telegram Open Network, or TON, and an associated coin called Gram. The project was halted by the SEC for violating U.S. securities law in October, weeks before its scheduled launch. After six months of written arguments from both sides and one hearing in the U.S. Southern District Court in New York, Judge Kevin Castel supported the initial preliminary injunction barring Telegram from issuing tokens to investors, on March 24. Telegram moved immediately to appeal but in May it threw the towel in and decided to abandon the project. The Telegram team ceased development of TON and paid an $18.5m settlement, agreeing to return funds to investors.
On May 12, Telegram's CEO Pavel Durov announced in a blog post that Telegram would no longer be developing TON. The post marked Durov's first public statement about the project, which was being developed largely in secret.
There are multiple concurrent community-run networks that claim ownership over the TON token ticker. One of them is the former Newton project. As soon as Durov decided to drop TON, two developers, Anatoliy Makosov and Kirill Emelyanenko, took over the development of TON through an open-source community. Within a year, the community voted to launch on mainnet and changed its name to The Open Network (TON) Foundation. Although the project was developed by a number of Telegram programmers, its current version has no relation to Telegram or Durov himself.
By the third quarter of 2021, TON had launched decentralized bridges linking to the Ethereum (TON-ETH) and Binance Smart Chain (TON-BSC) networks, which enable users to transfer TON tokens to the two blockchain networks. In Q4, the network token was listed on cryptocurrency exchanges such as OKX, Bitget, FTX, Gate.io, and HitBTC. The project plans to launch more user-friendly features to complement the cryptocurrency ecosystem.
So what is TON crypto? According to the project’s white paper, ‘The Open Network (TON) is a fast, secure and scalable blockchain and network project, capable of handling millions of transactions per second.’
One interesting feature of the new project is that the TON blockchain is actually a collection of blockchains. The team behind TON claims that it’s because no single blockchain project is capable of achieving the ultimate goal of processing millions of transactions per second, as opposed to the now-standard dozens of transactions per second.
TON uses a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) protocol to achieve on-chain consensus, and is designed with an eye toward handling millions of transactions per second (TPS) if necessary. This speed is supported by a scaling technique called sharding, which partitions data storage and processing responsibilities to smaller validator groups. This diffusion of responsibility results in lower transaction latency and higher throughput than often found in many blockchains that tend to operate as a single state layer. The project also offers a number of other innovative technologies, among them are:
Almost all blockchain sharding proposals are ‘top-down’: one first imagines a single blockchain, and then discusses how to split it into several interacting shard chains to improve performance and achieve scalability. The TON approach to sharding is ‘bottom-up.’
Let’s assume that exactly one account or smart contract remains in each shard chain. The blockchain will then feature a huge number of account chains, each describing the state and state transitions of only one account, and sending value-bearing messages to each other. It is impractical to have hundreds of millions of blockchains, with updates (i.e., new blocks) usually appearing quite rarely in each of them. In order to implement them more efficiently, these account chains are grouped into shard chains, so that each block of the shard chain is essentially a collection of blocks of account chains that have been assigned to this shard. This is the Infinite Sharding Paradigm.
Instant Hypercube Routing
The Infinite Sharding Paradigm instructs us to regard each account (or smart contract) as if it were in its own shard chain by itself. Then the only way one account might affect the state of another is by sending a message to it. Therefore, a system of messages between accounts is of paramount importance to a scalable system such as the TON blockchain. A novel feature of the TON blockchain called Instant Hypercube Routing enables it to deliver and process a message created in a block of one shard chain into the very next block of the destination shard chain, regardless of the total number of shard chains in the system.
Validators stake Toncoin for a fixed specific term, and the stake is refunded with interest after the completion of a validation round. Open-source software is available for those that wish to become validators. Network validators verify user transactions. If all validators reach consensus that a transaction is valid, it is included in the blockchain. Invalid transactions are rejected. Therefore, validators have to correctly process user transactions at maximum speed to get rewarded and avoid penalties.
Nominators are network participants who lend their assets to validators. Toncoin earned by the validator is distributed to nominators according to pool settings. Pools are assets of a validator and nominators managed by smart contracts. These guarantee the correct use of borrowed coins.
TON also features a variety of wallet options, both custodial and non-custodial. Furthermore, the wallet feature will be built into applications so users can seamlessly transfer funds and interact with other services on the TON network. The project’s non-custodial wallets include Tonkeeper, Tonhub, TON Wallet, and Coin98 Wallet as the most prominent ones, and an impressive number of other wallets for all platforms and needs, including many social networking, mining, and chatting apps.
In June 2020, all of the available Toncoin tokens (98.55% of the total supply) became available for mining. The tokens were placed in special Giver smart contracts, allowing anyone to participate in the mining until June 28, 2022. Users mined around 200,000 TON daily.
After the initial distribution of coins, TON enters a new stage, increasing the number of validators and coins involved in validation, which leads to strengthening the stability and security of the network.
The TON Foundation has announced a host of exciting developments, including high-level negotiations about stablecoin adoption in Cameroon, The Republic of the Congo, and The Democratic Republic of the Congo. Other news has included the creation of large ecosystem funds, such as the Toncoin Fund created in April 2022, along with $90M TON Alpha-Vista Fund in July.
TON is currently developing a bridge that will allow cross-chain transfer of value between the Ethereum network and the Binance Smart Chain (BSC). In aTwitter post, Toncoin outlines that the token bridge is in the final stages of testing. Users can move any ERC-20 or BEP-20 tokens like USDC and USDT from Ethereum to the TON blockchain and back.
More recently, the TON Foundation announced the intention of Telegram to launch a marketplace for tokenized Telegram handles built on TON. KuCoin’s venture arm, KuCoin Ventures, has worked with the TON ecosystem before, having led the creation of the $250M Toncoin Ecosystem Fund alongside Huobi Incubator. This most recent announcement continues TON’s long-standing collaboration with KuCoin and might lead to further TON price rise.
Additionally, TON partnered with Huobi Global that will be launching deposit events for TON, including an ongoingpromo with up to 500% on TON for every 50 TON bought via Huobi.
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