The TON development roadmap has many interesting points planned like the stablecoin toolkit, sharding tools, and BTC, ETH, and BNB native bridge. While there are no release dates, we hope they will go live in 2024. In this article, we will explain upcoming features, how they will affect the network, and whether they change TON staking rewards.

We divided the most interesting points into three categories for the better understanding of the combined impact. Dive in!

Gasless Transactions

This is the most intriguing milestone in the TON roadmap for 2024. No other major chain offers gasless transactions, so TON could revolutionize the blockchain space and attract more users from other ecosystems.

In every blockchain users have to pay gas fees for their transactions. Blockchain protocols cannot nullify gas fees, as they prevent spammers from clogging the network by sending thousands of transactions per second.

Probably TON will subsidize gas fees for some cases like Telegram wallet or USDT transfers to attract more users to use TON for everyday needs. Imagine that you can just send your friend $5 in Telegram, without asking his credit card number or wallet address, and what’s more important — for free.

Changes to Staking

Collator and Validator Separation

This is a big upgrade to TON’s scalability. Collation means collecting transactions, validating them, and putting them together into a block. To do so, the nodes store and constantly monitor the whole network state — all balances of all addresses in TON blockchain.

TON plans to onboard 500 million Telegram users by 2028 and leverage sharding to provide adequate transaction execution time and low transaction fees. With sharding, the blockchain is split into a few shard chains. 2 shard chains provide 2x throughput, 4 shard chains — 4x, and so on.

Each shard chain will have its own validator subset to collate and validate blocks. Those validators have to be rotated frequently through subsets to ensure security. Here comes the problem: with random rotations, validators will have to store the state of each shard instead of only their shard’s state. Storing the state for 1 million accounts requires a powerful server while storing the state for 500 million accounts in one place is impossible.

To solve the problem TON team proposed to separate validation and collation into two roles: may Collators store the state of only their shardchain and collate blocks, while Validators assigned to that shardchain for a time only validate and sign blocks. The load and risks would be equally split and the TON could scale to board billions of users.

In the official docs, staking rewards aren’t mentioned. While only validators will risk with their stakes in block validation, collators should also receive rewards for storing the state and generating blocks.

Despite the validation process becoming more complicated, TON staking APY won’t change and Tonstakers liquid staking will remain as profitable as it is now.

Sharding Guidelines and Tools

TON will be one of the first blockchains to efficiently leverage sharding thanks to prominent developers in charge. Centralized exchanges, payment systems, and even TON services and apps will need special toolsets and documentation to implement sharding support, as this is technology they aren’t used to. This is why TON developers want to release such instruments in the near future.

Slashing Optimization

Slashing is a penalty for validators who do their job poorly: miss blocks, go offline frequently, or even try to push fraudulent transactions into the blocks.

Currently, TON uses a complaint mechanism to punish misbehaving validators. Any network participant can file a complaint with proof and hold a bad validator accountable.

The slashing optimization should bring a better system to detect and penalize misbehaving validators, increasing TON robustness. This will be implemented in a few steps: at first, liquid staking protocols won’t be affected by validator slashing, and users’ rewards will be guaranteed. Then the slashing will be distributed on TON provided by liquid staking protocols too, slightly decreasing the average APY.

Elector and Config Contracts Updates

TON staking, liquid staking, and on-chain governance are implemented in smart contracts. Tonstakers also uses such contracts to pool TON, provide TON to validators, and distribute rewards among our users.

This elector and config contracts update will allow our users to vote for network proposals, making the network more open to everyone and increasing the value of each user.

Decentralized Finance

We put these changes in one place because if combined they will make a positive impact on the DeFi ecosystem.

TON Stablecoin Toolkit

There is no explanation for what exactly it will be apart from the name. We can guess that the Stablecoin Toolkit will allow anyone to issue algorithmic stablecoins pegged to local fiat currencies: GBP, EUR, NZD, and so on.

Considering TON’s integration into Telegram, a built-in wallet, and the recent decision to share advertisement profits with channel owners in TON, we can assume that Telegram might add payments in local stablecoins for built-in services.

Jetton Bridge

TON already has bridges to Ethereum and BNB chains for bridging $TON and popular coins like ETH, BNB, and USDC.

Jetton Bridge will allow users to send TON tokens like tsTON to other chains. Why not add tsTON on Uniswap?

ETH, BNB, and BTC Bridge

While we have third-party bridges, launching an official bridge to bring major cryptocurrencies to TON seems logical in the light of issuing them as extra currencies.

Extra Currencies

$TON is the native token: it is used for staking and paying gas fees. Its code, for example, functions to transact $TON, are built-in TON protocol, and the balances are kept in the accounts.

Jettons (the regular tokens like USDT and tsTON) are operated with third-party smart contracts and can’t substitute $TON for fees and staking. Users’ balances are stored in those contracts.

Extra currencies will allow TON users to create native-like tokens, which will be stored in accounts too. The most noticeable difference between extra currencies and Jettons is that extra currencies’ transactions should be 2–3x cheaper because they will happen without contract calls.

Issuing major tokens like bridged BTC and ETH or native USDT as extra currencies will make TON more preferable to work with them and will bring more new users to TON. Want to buy BTC, ETH, and BNB? TON will have them in one place.

Our Conclusions

The TON roadmap looks promising and brings a lot of new tools to make TON more popular among the masses.

The most impactful updates we see are native currencies, bridges, and stablecoin toolkit — together, they will expand possible TON use cases for everyday payments and allow more people to start building their crypto portfolio.

Meanwhile, we at Tonstakers are interested in validator and collator separation, slashing optimization, and staking contract updates. The separation and sharding won’t affect the staking APY, and the contract update will bring more value for liquid staking users, as they will get the right to vote for TON update proposals.

Can’t wait for the future TON will bring us in 2024!

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