TON: A Journey of Rebellion Against Fate

Among the most关注 public chains in 2024, TON undoubtedly occupies an important position. As a high-performance Layer 1 public chain, TON has a close relationship with an instant messaging platform that boasts over 900 million monthly active users, which makes it highly favored by the capital market. According to a research report from a venture capital institution, TON's on-chain data has shown explosive growth in the past six months: daily active users have increased from 200,000 to 500,000, and the number of wallets has surged from less than 10 million to over 44 million.

In April 2024, a certain stablecoin issued over $700 million in circulation on TON, making TON the fifth largest blockchain by issuance of this stablecoin. Meanwhile, the native token of TON surged over 25% in a single day on April 10, reaching a price of $7 and a market capitalization of $23.7 billion, surpassing a well-known token to become the tenth largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization.

On August 9th, a large trading platform launched the TON token and unexpectedly announced on the 13th that TON would participate in a new coin mining activity. This is the first project to participate in new coin mining on the platform after being in circulation, and it is currently the largest project by market capitalization for new coin listing on the platform.

However, the situation suddenly reversed. On August 25, the CEO of an instant messaging platform closely related to TON was arrested by French police in Paris, accused of failing to effectively manage the platform, leading to the spread of illegal activities such as terrorism, money laundering, and drug trafficking on the platform. As a result, the price of TON tokens dropped by more than 14% within 24 hours, and the total locked value of its ecosystem plummeted by more than 40% within 24 hours.

After the incident, several heavyweight figures in the industry, including a well-known tech entrepreneur and media personalities, publicly expressed their support for the arrested CEO. The official TON account on social media posted the word "Resistance." to show its stance and changed its profile picture to the Resistance Dog (REDO) image hand-drawn by the CEO in 2018.

The TON community account not only updated its profile picture but also launched the #DigitalResistance campaign on social media.

"Today, we stand together with the founder of the instant messaging platform. To support DigitalResistance, we have updated the token logo and profile picture on the TON community channel to the global symbol of digital resistance - the Resistance Dog. The founder initiated this movement while fighting to maintain user privacy and protect freedom of speech."

It is worth noting that the official page of a large trading platform shows that the logo of TON has also been updated to Resistance Dog. A resistance movement facing destiny is unfolding in the digital world.

The Development History of TON

The story of TON is filled with entanglements of people and fate. Looking back at its development history, one cannot overlook the instant messaging platform closely related to it. This platform was founded by two Russian brothers in 2013, aiming to provide a more secure and private communication service.

The platform uses an encryption protocol called MTProto, designed for speed and security, supporting end-to-end encryption to ensure that only the two parties in a conversation can read the message content. Although all messages are encrypted and stored on the server, users can also choose to use the "secret chat" feature for specific conversations that employs end-to-end encryption, meaning that no third party, including the platform's servers, can read the chat content.

With high levels of security and user experience, the platform has quickly grown to become one of the leading communication tools globally, boasting nearly 900 million monthly active users, and has become an important tool for the Web3 community.

In 2017, in response to the security and privacy needs of a large user base, the platform's founder began developing a blockchain project called Telegram Open Network (TON) and planned to launch its native cryptocurrency.

In 2018, approximately $1.7 billion was raised through an ICO, making it one of the largest token offerings at the time, attracting participation from several major venture capital firms and individual investors, while also drawing the attention of regulatory authorities.

In October 2019, a regulatory agency accused the project of conducting an unregistered securities offering. This legal challenge greatly hindered the progress of the TON project. After long communications and legal battles with the regulatory agency, the project team announced in May 2020 that they would withdraw from the TON project, and the development work was handed over to an independent open-source developer community. The project was renamed "The Open Network," and the token name was changed to Toncoin. The funds raised from the ICO were refunded.

In 2021, the TON Foundation, founded by Anatoliy Makosov and Kirill Emelianenko, took over the project and continued to develop towards decentralization and scalability.

In 2023, the instant messaging platform officially announced that it would use the TON blockchain as its preferred Web3 infrastructure and integrate it into the user interface of the application this year. The TON token is also used for all transactions and payment activities with channel owners, effectively becoming the platform's "native token."

The Economic Model, Core Technology, and Ecosystem of TON

The core design concept of TON is to reconstruct traditional blockchain protocols in a "bottom-up" manner, pursuing extreme performance and scalability, and in the future, it will support 30% of instant messaging platform users. TON has attracted considerable attention from users and investors due to its unique design philosophy, high-performance capabilities, and the traffic support from large social platforms.

Economic Model

The initial total supply of TON tokens is 5 billion. In terms of token distribution, the team initially holds 1.45% of the tokens, while the remaining 98.55% were mined in the early stages through PoW.

Mining on TON starts spontaneously and randomly. The project team was forced to stop working on TON due to the lawsuit with regulators that ended in 2020 and reached a settlement. To exit the TON project while allowing enthusiasts to explore the technology, the team placed all the tokens of the blockchain into a smart contract, allowing anyone to mine them equally.

With the exhaustion of the token distribution smart contract for PoW, traditional TON mining has come to an end. TON has entered the PoS phase, adding more validators and increasing the tokens used for validation, thereby enhancing the stability and security of the network. By participating in network operations, validators can earn new TON tokens as rewards, with an annual inflation of 0.6%. Currently, approximately 650 million TON tokens are staked.

The total supply of TON tokens is currently approximately 5.1 billion, but due to the TON Foundation freezing about 1.1 billion TON tokens in early inactive mining wallets and about 1.3 billion TON tokens locked in the TON Believers Fund (which will start unlocking in October 2025), the circulating supply is less than 2.7 billion.

The TON token can serve not only as a Gas token and staking token on the TON network but also as a "token aggregation" on instant messaging platforms to enhance its value. For instance, the platform recently announced that it would exclusively use TON tokens for advertising payments. In this setup, advertisers use TON tokens to fund their marketing activities, with revenue split between the platform and content creators. Additionally, the platform has begun accepting TON tokens for premium membership service fees, which is offered through specific stores and currently has 5 million subscribers. These initiatives demonstrate the platform team's efforts to ensure that the TON token serves as a token with practical uses and a clear value accumulation mechanism.

Core Technology

The core technology of TON is its Infinite Sharding Paradigm, which greatly enhances the processing power and scalability of the TON network.

Sharding is a scaling solution to the scalability trilemma, and its basic idea is to divide the entire blockchain network into multiple smaller segments (shards), each of which can independently process a portion of transactions and data. By distributing transactions and data across different shards, the sharding mechanism can increase the overall throughput and performance of the network, similar to how opening multiple checkout lanes at a supermarket can intuitively reduce waiting time and enhance checkout efficiency. In addition to TON, there are several other well-known sharded chains.

The shard architecture of TON is divided into three layers: Masterchain, Workchain, and Shardchain. There is only one Masterchain, which is responsible for coordination; Workchain is a virtual concept that exists as a collection of Shardchains, with the system being able to accommodate up to 2^32 Workchains; Shardchain is responsible for actual transaction processing and is dynamic, capable of automatically splitting when the load increases and merging when the load decreases, with each Workchain able to split into a maximum of 2^60 Shardchains.

To solve the communication problem between shard chains, TON adopts a smart contract based on the Actor model, using FunC as the main contract programming language. In TON, each smart contract instance has an address, code, and a data unit (persistent state), and smart contracts always have atomic synchronized access to all their persistent states. However, the communication between smart contract instances is neither atomic nor synchronous, which is a significant difference from the development paradigms of other smart contract chains (such as Ethereum and Solana), and leads to difficulties and slow progress in DeFi development on TON.

If you have some understanding of the microservices architecture of Web2, you can simply compare smart contracts on TON to microservices, and the entire infinite sharding paradigm of TON can be likened to a certain container orchestration service—creating new contract instances and scaling them up or down, moving them as needed to optimize the system.

ecosystem

The TON ecosystem currently has over 500 Dapps, covering major areas such as infrastructure, development tools, DeFi, GameFi, SocialFi, NFTs, memes, inscriptions, and almost all popular directions.

However, the real narrative of the TON ecosystem lies in the Web3 landscape of instant messaging platforms, mainly consisting of platform Bots and Mini Apps (TMA).

Platform Bots are automated tools that operate on the communication platform, capable of responding to messages, managing data, or interacting with users in a programmatic manner. Developers can create Bots to perform various tasks, such as sending notifications, providing information services, and even handling complex commands. Users interact with Bots through conversational means to achieve automation functions. Currently, platform Bots play an important role in community building in Web3, asset management, information aggregation, project promotion, and DeFi trading.

TMA is a web application running within this instant messaging platform, launched by the TON Foundation, designed to meet users' needs for gaming, content sharing, productivity tools, and more, easily accessible from chats or group conversations. The built-in non-custodial wallet TMA, similar to a certain well-known Web3 wallet, allows users to receive, send, and exchange tokens, and the wallet page displays the NFTs held by the wallet.

The organic combination of the built-in wallet, platform Bot/TMA, and TON provides users with a complete closed-loop Web3 experience: starting from receiving messages and communicating in groups/channels, to conducting token transactions and interacting with DApps on TON through Bot/TMA, and finally using the built-in wallet to participate in TON ecosystem projects with TON Space.

Summary

TON has experienced numerous trials, from being the focus of public attention at its inception, to being sued by regulatory authorities which led to the suspension of plans, and finally being taken over and developed by the community. It has overcome these challenges time and again, improving step by step, and demonstrating its strong vitality.

TON is backed by an instant messaging platform with 900 million monthly active users, providing user traffic that is hard for any other public chain project to match. TON's infinite sharding technology theoretically supports millions of TPS, and its integration with this messaging platform offers a unique opportunity for the true large-scale adoption of Web3. The rapid growth of on-chain metrics, strong support from leading capital, and the success of various ecosystem projects highlight its potential.

The founder of the instant messaging platform created a platform known for its anti-censorship and strong encryption, and also created the REDO image that symbolizes the spirit of resistance. TON seems to have established itself as a symbol of the founder's resistance spirit.