In 2018, Telegram wanted to issue its own cryptocurrency, so it created the Telegram Open Network project and raised US$1.7 billion through an ICO. The token name at the time was $GRAM. However, the following year in October 2019, he was accused by the US SEC of illegal fundraising. Therefore, in May 2020, Telegram founder Pavel Durov publicly announced that he would abandon the blockchain project TON and was fined US$18.5 million by the SEC.
In May 2020, TON technology research and development team TON Labs announced that the code of the TON project would be open sourced and the development of the project would be terminated. It agreed to pay the SEC a settlement of US$18.5 million and return the funds raised to investors. Subsequently, Free TON, a decentralized community composed of software developers, 13 validators and users, released a forked version of the “Free TON Blockchain” blockchain with the Token name “Ton Crystals”. However, Ton Crystals officially stopped updating and development for a long time.
In May 2021, the New Ton developer community spontaneously established by the Telegram community began to continue to study TON and promote the development of the TON project. The project has also changed from Telegram Open Network to The Open Network, and the token is TON. Then TON will be listed on various exchanges in November 2021, and the founder of Telegram publicly supports the TON project.
In August 2021, the TON/WETH trading pair was launched on the decentralized exchange Uniswap and began trading, and was launched on other DEXs and major CEXs in subsequent Q4 and 2022 (Binance is still not online as of November 2023).
In November 2021, at the climax of the last bull market, BTC rose to its highest point and then fell back. Then various Altcoins also began to make up for the last wave of gains. The price of TON rose rapidly from 0.8 USD to 4.5 USD and then fell back. In addition, the price of TON has remained relatively stable in the bear market, maintaining between 1 and 2.5 USD, and its market value continues to increase.
In April 2022, the TON Foundation announced the establishment of a US$250 million ecosystem fund “TONcoin Fund”, which received investment from exchanges and institutions such as Huobi, KuCoin, MEXC, 3Commas Capital, TON Miners and Kilo Funds. Subsequently, the TON Foundation announced that it would provide a wallet robot for Telegram, which means that Telegram users can send and receive TON and exchange other crypto assets directly in Telegram.
In July 2022, the TON Foundation established a new $90 million ecological fund TON Alpha-Vista. Investors in this fund include VistaLabs, Alphanonce, Miner’s Fund and Kilo Fund.
In September 2023, the short-term rapid rise in TON currency prices attracted a lot of attention in the market. At its peak, TON’s circulating market value reached US$9 billion, ranking ninth in the market value of all crypto assets.
Although TON encountered some regulatory and legal difficulties in previous years, it has received great attention and support from the blockchain and cryptocurrency communities, and has also received continued enthusiasm from the market in 2023. TON aims to provide Telegram’s more than 800 million users with fast, secure decentralized payments, digital identity and other services. TON hopes to scale to millions of transactions per second and support a decentralized ecosystem.
TON solves the scalability and interoperability issues of blockchain through its multi-blockchain architecture. Specifically, TON’s technical features can be divided into the following aspects:
a. Multi-chain architecture:The TON blockchain is a collection of blockchains, consisting of a three-level architecture of the main chain Masterchain, the work chain Workchain, and the shard chain Shardchain (the maximum number of work chains can reach 2^32, and other reference materials mention that it is 2^92 , the author checked the latest version of the white paper and believes that it should be the 32nd power. If it is not accurate, please contact us for modification). The main chain is the main blockchain that contains all information about the protocol and current parameters. The working chain is the blockchain that handles smart contract transactions. The working chain is further fragmented to become a shard chain. Through working chains and dynamic sharding TON can verify and process millions of transactions per second, quickly achieving massive scalability and interoperability regardless of network size, and between any two blockchains Instant transfer of messages.
Image source: CGV FoF (reproduced by Zonff Partners)
The main chain and working chain on TON are heterogeneous multi-chains. Different working chains may have different “rules”, that is, different account address formats, different transaction formats, different smart contract virtual machines (VMs), and different basic Cryptocurrencies etc. But they all meet certain basic interoperability standards to make interoperability between different work chains possible and relatively simple. In this regard, the heterogeneity of the TON blockchain is similar to the EOS and PolkaDot projects.
The working chain and sharding chain on TON are isomorphic multi-chains. Each working chain can be divided into up to 2^60 sharding blockchains, or sharding chains for short (some other reference materials mentioned that this is 2^64, the author After checking the latest version of the white paper, I think this should be the 60th power. If it is not accurate, please contact us for modification). Its rules and block format are the same as the working chain itself, but it is only responsible for a group of accounts, depending on the first few digits of the account address. Since all these shard chains share a common block format and rules, they are isomorphic, similar to what was discussed in the Ethereum scaling proposal.
b. Proof of Staking + Byzantine Fault Tolerant:The consensus algorithm used by TON is the same as that of Cosmos and Polkadot. According to the white paper, becoming a node does not require permission and only requires a certain number of tokens and ordinary IT operation and maintenance capabilities. There are four roles in the TON network: Validator, Nominator, Fisherman, and Collator. If a validator signs an invalid block candidate, it may be automatically punished, lose some or all of its pledges, or be temporarily suspended from the validator set for a period of time; in addition, the blessing of the BFT consensus mechanism guarantees Consensus will not branch and is more suitable for a “tightly coupled” multi-chain architecture.
c. Anonymous protection of account privacy:TON Proxy (Network Proxy/Anonymity Layer), similar to I2P (Invisible Internet Project), is used to hide identities and create decentralized virtual private networks (🪜) to protect online privacy. For example, account nodes with a large number of tokens, or high-risk blockchain verification nodes who want to hide their exact IP address and geographical location to resist DDoS attacks will value this feature.
d. FunC/Fift/TACT:FunC is a programming language for the TON Virtual Machine (TVM). This domain-specific, statically typed language is used to write smart contracts on the TON blockchain. In TON, FunC is usually not compiled directly into bytecode, but through another low-level Fift programming language. Just like FunC, Fift is another language designed specifically for the TON blockchain. Fift is a low-level language very close to TVM opcodes, specifically used to develop and manage TON blockchain smart contracts and interact with the TON virtual machine. For most developers, FunC and Fift are both relatively difficult, and the official has also launched the relatively easy TACT programming language for developers to use.
The TON team wrote a paper specifically explaining the differences between TON, Solana and Ethereum:
Image source: https://ton.org/zh/analysis
a. Block and finalization time
Users often focus on transaction speed and the speed of the blockchain. The faster blocks are built, the less time users have to wait for remittances and smart contract execution.
TON - TON generates a new block on each shard chain and the main chain approximately every 5 seconds. New blocks on all shard chains are generated almost simultaneously, while a new block on the main chain is generated approximately after one second because it must contain all The hash of the latest block of the shard chain.
ETH - Ethereum includes slots and epochs. A slot is a 12-second interval during which validators can propose new beacon chains and shard chains. 32 time slots make up an epoch (6.4 minutes), and there are specific rules that require at least 2 epochs for final confirmation of a block, which means that it takes at least 12.8 minutes to confirm a block.
Solana - Solana claims to be able to generate a block per second or faster, but it has an extended block finalization time. A block is typically finalized after 16 voting rounds, with each round expected to last approximately 400 milliseconds. This means a latency of 6.4 seconds.
b.Performance
Blockchain performance represents the platform’s ability to handle large-scale smart contracts, which is very important for complex blockchain products such as DeFi, GameFi, and DAO.
TON - TON is a Turing-complete high-performance blockchain that can adapt to any complex transactions on the main chain and all its working chains.
ETH - Ethereum only has a Turing-complete EVM on the beacon chain, and the network is limited to 15 transactions per second. The lack of cross-shard interaction means that other transactions cannot be executed in a truly decentralized environment.
Solana - Solana is Turing complete, but it only performs well on a few very simple predefined types of transactions (which only change account balances but not state), and only performs best when all account data fits in RAM (Some problems may arise if it does not fit).
c. Scalability
Scalability is directly related to the number of users and their interactions (transactions, smart contract executions, infrastructure requests).
TON - TON supports work chains and dynamic sharding. The system can accommodate up to 2^32 work chains, and each work chain can be subdivided into up to 2^60 shard chains, with almost instantaneous cross-shard and cross-sharding. Chain communication function enables millions of transactions per second.
ETH - Ethereum will support up to 64 shard chains and beacon chains. At this stage, it is unclear what the exact performance of the new 64 shard chains will be and how the shard chains will interact with each other. However, if messaging between shard chains is once introduced, you will have to wait 10 - 15 minutes until the shard chain block finalizes the emitted message before it can be processed on the other shard chain. Additionally, additional shards are not currently expected to be able to run EVM smart contracts. Instead, they are intended to be used as additional data storage in the distributed ledger.
Solana - Solana supports neither sharding nor work chains.
White Paper: Comparison of TON, Solana and Ethereum 2.0
The initial total supply of TON is 5 billion, with no upper limit on supply. The team owns 1.45% of the tokens, and the remaining 98.55% were mined by POW in the early stage. At present, the network consensus has been converted from POW to POS, and the total amount of TON is inflating at about 0.6% per year. These Tokens are used to reward validators who maintain network security. The creation and initial issuance of TON Token is very unique and in some ways similar to Bitcoin. In June 2020, all TON (98.55% of the total supply) was available for mining until June 28, 2022, when the last TON Token mined marked the successful end of TON IDO.
The main uses of TON Token in the network include paying transaction fees, securing the chain through staking, making decisions about the future of the network, and ultimately making payments. Additionally, TON Token is used to pay for decentralized data storage, pay to use TON proxies, pay for TON DNS, vote, reward validators, and more.
The current total supply of TON is approximately 5 billion, of which 1.08 billion are frozen in inactive wallets of early miners, approximately 470 million are pledged by POS validators, and the circulating supply is 3.53 billion TON.
Due to TON’s special historical reasons, unlike other new public chains, early investment institutions and project parties hold a large number of tokens and are held hostage by capital. The advantage is that you don’t have to worry about institutions unlocking and smashing the market, but the disadvantages are also very similar. In the early days, large miners held more concentrated coins, replacing institutions. Now the top 100 whale addresses hold more than 50% of the total amount of Tokens.
Image source: CoinmarketCap
In February 2023, TON VOTE passed a “TON Token Economic Model Optimization Proposal”, which proposed to temporarily freeze inactive mining wallets for 48 months. These wallets have never been activated and do not have any mining records in their history. Make a transfer. There are currently 171 inactive mining wallets. These 171 wallets hold a total of more than 1.081 billion TON, accounting for about 21% of the total TON supply at that time.
Image source: Tonwhales
Although the community’s vote to freeze inactive mining wallets for 48 months will temporarily alleviate this part of the selling pressure, due to the idea of decentralization, these wallets are unlikely to be permanently frozen. In comparison, the total amount of coins held by the top 100 Bitcoin addresses is only 13.63%. This unreasonable token distribution will pose a great threat to the TON ecosystem in the future.
In addition to temporarily freezing inactive wallets, the community also voted to reduce the circulating supply by burning half of the transaction fees, but currently only about 450 TON can be burned per day, which is simply a waste of the initial issuance of 5 billion. A drop in the bucket.
Image source: Tonstat
If you carefully observe the price of TON, you will find that there is a serious mismatch between its circulating market value and average daily trading volume. TON currently ranks 11th in circulating market value and 139th in trading volume, and this market value is only the circulating market value, not FDV , if all TON are included, the total market value of FDV will exceed 10 billion US dollars. Since the price of TON was initially listed on Uniswap in August 2021, except for the rapid price rise to $4.5 in November 2021 in conjunction with the favorable environment of the bull market, and then quickly falling back, its price has been maintained between 1 - 2.5 USD, even if In the bear market, it has never fallen below the issue price of 0.5. The author believes that this is because during the bear market, retail investors do not have any TON Coins in their hands to smash, so there will not be a continuous downward trend in currency prices like many other public chains in the bear market. In addition, it can be seen that the circulating market value of TON has remained at a high value of more than one billion U.S. dollars since 2022, but its average daily transaction volume is even as low as several million U.S. dollars. Compared with the same period last year, Solana, which has maintained a market capitalization of several billions since the bear market, has an average daily trading volume of several hundred million US dollars. TON’s average daily trading volume is not even one-tenth of Solana’s.
TON’s concentrated position distribution and large potential selling pressure pose a great psychological obstacle to the entry and exchange of hands by large funds and institutions. Combined with the current low trading volume, it is difficult to conduct a reasonable valuation. It is expected that in the future many adjustments to the chip structure and circulation mechanism will be needed to stimulate trading volume so that the market can establish more stable expectations.
The steady rise in TON prices in the short and medium term is most likely the result of the market value management team cooperating with the favorable ecological hype. It is not a bad thing to manage the market value of a public chain like TON. Good and stable currency price performance is also conducive to the long-term and stable expansion of the Telegram ecosystem of the TON public chain, and the ecological development will not be affected by the sudden rise and fall of currency prices. Solana’s currency price performance in the last cycle reached a maximum circulation market value of US$80 billion with the cooperation of the market value management team. Therefore, market value management is a favorable factor for the short- and medium-term price of TON. However, in the long run, since the top 100 whale addresses hold more than 50% of the total token supply, TON also has hidden dangers of centralization and potential huge selling pressure. People who hold more TON Coin can control the 100 Monitor the address settings on each chain.
It is also worth noting that well-known market maker DWF Labs announced in June that it will contribute to the token economics, market making and liquidity provision of the TON ecosystem. Moreover, as of November 2023, among the top 100 currencies by market capitalization, apart from the platform coins of other exchanges and BSV, only TON has not yet been listed on Binance, which also leaves a new round of growth expectations for TON.
According to ton.app statistics, there are currently 551 Apps in the Ton ecosystem, which is not a small number for a public chain that has not yet exploded; however, there are only 9 Apps included in DefiLlama, and the number one Bemo accounts for more than half of the TVL (7.3M). Most of them are non-financial products, which is also in line with Ton’s positioning and expectations, and is a good testing ground for non-financial products.
Image source: https://ton.app/
a. The huge payment ecosystem contained in the combination of Telegram and TON
At the recent Token2049 Summit, Telegram officially announced a partnership with the TON Foundation. Telegram will integrate the self-hosted encryption wallet “TON Space” launched by TON, allowing Wallet to be accessed directly in the Telegram menu, completing the Crypto self-cycle. Telegram has a large user base worldwide, with 1.3 billion registered users, many of whom hail from Russia, Iran, India and other Asian and European countries. According to Telegram’s founder, he said in his personal channel on July 18, Telegram has more than 2.5 million new users registering every day, and its monthly active users have exceeded 800 million.
Data compiled by statista in January 2023 shows that this number is 1.4 times that of ). Telegram is currently one of the must-have Crypto apps and has a huge Crypto user base.
TON Space users can seamlessly connect to TON ecological applications through Telegram accounts. Users can directly connect to TON Space from TON-based decentralized applications (dApps) and enjoy the functions and services it provides. TON Space acts as a blockchain account supporting assets such as TON in the ecosystem. Some people compare TON Space to Telegram and WeChat Pay to Tencent to illustrate the importance of this cooperation.
As early as April 2022, the TON Foundation announced that it would provide Telegram with a new wallet robot @wallet. Users can send and receive Toncoin and purchase Bitcoin directly in Telegram. This means that users do not need to enter a lengthy wallet address and wait for verification to complete the transaction.
In September 2023, the TON Foundation announced that it would launch TON Space, a self-hosted digital wallet based on Telegram, globally in November. TON Space accounts provide self-custody services, and third parties cannot access users’ assets, ensuring a certain level of security. TON Space is built into Wallet after its launch. The built-in non-custodial wallet does not require the introduction of a third-party payment and settlement platform. While avoiding the risk of jumping to other platforms for transactions, it also enhances the crypto-financial attributes of the Telegram platform itself.
Currently, Telegram can directly call out the wallet without any downloading and allows depositing assets such as usdt/ton/btc for transactions.
Telegram’s current payment function allows users to send TON and BTC to friends directly in the app’s chat room. The usage is the same as WeChat Pay. This convenient payment experience has greatly empowered TON. Many public chains may have a complete ecology but do not have a usage scenario for traditional users, making it difficult to get out of the circle. However, TON was born with the protection of Telegram and enjoys the hundreds of millions of traditional traffic and the most direct application scenarios brought by Telegram.
b. Sluggish DeFi ecosystem
In contrast to the huge empowerment that Telegram itself brings to TON, the current DeFi lock-up amount of TON is very low, only 9.2 million US dollars. There are only 9 apps included in DefiLlama, and the number one app, Bemo, accounts for more than half of the TVL (7.3M). You know, even a public chain like EOS, which is about to rot, has a TVL of more than $69 million.
Different from other Layer1, TON’s development route may not rely on increasing the amount of TVL in the DeFi ecosystem on the chain, but rather through Telegram payment, robots (TG Bot), mini games (similar to mini programs in the WeChat ecosystem), etc. as the main development game road. Therefore, judging the valuation of TON through the traditional Mcap/TVL on-chain asset lock-up calculation method may be less accurate. The core advantage of TON is its close integration with the Telegram ecosystem, which has a MAU of 800 million, making it the traffic entry point for a large number of Web2 users to enter the encryption ecosystem. In the next cycle, many new projects will appear in the GameFi and SocialFi sectors with Ponzi attributes, and the TON ecosystem with huge Web2 traffic may become the focus of these projects.
Data source: DeFiLlama data as of October 18, 2023
At the same time, users who have used Telegram’s payment ecosystem should be able to feel the convenience it brings. Payment is often accompanied by huge financial infrastructure needs, such as stablecoins, DEX, lending, cross-chain bridges, etc. However, this part is not yet complete in the TON ecosystem, so it is also a direction that many entrepreneurial projects can try. In this regard, TON’s DeFi ecology can be promoted according to the development model of other mature public chains, and does not require DeFi innovation or a complex EVM ecosystem.
c. Rapidly developing TG Bot track
In addition to the potential payment ecosystem opportunities brought about by the combination of TON and Telegram mentioned above, the robot (TG Bot) track is also likely to be a breaking point. Since May 2023, the Bot track has seen a steady upward trend in terms of transaction volume, business revenue, and the number of new users. The top three, Maestro, Banana Gun, and Unibot, all showed good trading volumes in the bear market. Unibot’s Token price has also increased tenfold in the bear market, and Maestro, which ranks first, has achieved an outstanding result of daily revenue of US$54K (DeFiLlama data; Maestro has not yet issued coins).
The explosion of the Bot ecosystem is inseparable from the empowerment of Telegram itself. The model in which users use Bots in Telegram to find and follow Smart Money transactions to make profits is one of the few positive ways to make profits in the bear market. In addition, many senior Web3 users on Twitter have a positive view of the TG Bot track, and have begun to use functions such as setting up on-chain monitoring and warnings in Telegram. Traditional on-chain monitoring is often nested in wallets, data websites, and self-made monitoring software, and the user habits of these channels are gradually being broken by Telegram. Users can directly integrate various functions such as information acquisition, user communication, data monitoring, payment transfer, and Crypto financial management on Telegram through TON.
Data source: Dune Analytics
In addition, Telegram’s potential future integration with games, social networking, NFT and other fields may still lead to new product models. These are all possible future empowerment targets of TON. Such as the game ecology of WeChat mini games, Telegram can also derive many similar gameplays in the future. The rapid integration of @wallet with small games has even directly bypassed the restrictions on legal currency deposits and withdrawals in games around the world (compliance has yet to be discussed), greatly lowering the entry threshold for the GameFi ecosystem for many small game developers. The Axie and StepN modes in the last cycle can still be implemented through new simple gameplay on Telegram. For the Social track led by Friend.tech and the NFT track led by Opensea and Blur, in the traditional model, users often need to switch to B after discovering a certain product (such as a popular NFT) on a social platform. platform to participate or purchase. Telegram, because of its integration with TON Space, allows users to directly discover a product on a social platform and complete the participation or purchase directly, which greatly lowers the threshold for user participation and developer development.
d. Development tools and developer ecosystem
At present, TON officially relies on a lot of support from developers, including building Telegram Mini Apps and smart contracts.
Telegram Mini Apps are web applications that run inside Telegram Messenger. They are built using web technologies (HTML, CSS and JavaScript). Developers can create interfaces using JavaScript, the most widespread programming language. Here are some key points about Telegram Mini Apps:
Smart contract creation, development, and deployment on the TON blockchain leverage the FunC programming language and the TON Virtual Machine (TVM). FunC is a domain-specific, C-like statically typed language. The developer’s FunC program is compiled into Fift assembly code and generates the corresponding bytecode for the TON virtual machine. This bytecode (actually a tree of cells, like any other data in the TON blockchain) can be used to create smart contracts in the blockchain, or can be run on a local instance of TVM. Interested developers can find more specific development tool information on the TON official website.
In addition, TON Foundation also provides Grants programs to many developers, focusing on the development of DeFi, Gamefi, cross-chain middleware, development tools, DAO governance tools and other fields. For example, Tali AI, TonUp, Oputs DEX Aggregator, Gatto, etc. are all projects that will receive Grants from the TON Foundation in the third quarter of 2023. Developers who are interested in building projects in the TON ecosystem may wish to apply.
All in all, TON is a good testing ground for non-financial products, which is hugely different from foreign public chain products. Although TON encountered many difficulties in its early development, and was fined hugely by the SEC and returned US$1.2 billion in investment funds, etc., its subsequent development still did many things right: issuing coins at the end of the bull market at the end of 2021 and taking advantage of the favorable environment It created a wave of rapid rise, and then maintained the high market value of TON price with low liquidity through strong market control, and after the bear market began in 2022, it successively landed on major exchanges to expand liquidity. In addition, through the combination of TON and Telegram ecology, payment and other sectors will be combined to form an ecology, and TG’s huge Web2 traffic will be used to divert traffic to TON. To sum up, the development of TON in the next bull market is still worth looking forward to.
Note: The projects mentioned in the article do not constitute any investment advice. The article only represents the current personal views of the author and does not represent Zonff Partners. The information and opinions published in the article may no longer be accurate due to changes in circumstances or other factors after the date of publication.
If you have any suggestions on the content of this article, please leave your contact information for further discussion.
TON Whitepaper:https://docs.ton.org/ton.pdf
Telegram to Return $1.2 Billion to Investors and Pay $18.5 Million Penalty to Settle SEC Chargeshttps://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2020-146
Comparison of TON, Solana and Ethereum 2.0https://ton.org/comparison_of_blockchains.pdf
TON Blockchain Analysishttps://ton.org/zh/analysis
Fift: A Brief Introductionhttps://ton.org/fiftbase.pdf
CGV Research: Telegram Open Network’s technological advancement and future prospects https://www.chaincatcher.com/article/2102648
Blockchain thinking: Detailed explanation of The Open Network Is TON, which no one cares about, on the eve of a surge? https://www.theblockbeats.info/news/44943?search=1
Day: Backed by 800 million monthly active social giants, will the TON ecosystem be “a flash in the pan” or “progress rapidly” https://www.bitget.com/zh-CN/news/detail/12560603814344
In 2018, Telegram wanted to issue its own cryptocurrency, so it created the Telegram Open Network project and raised US$1.7 billion through an ICO. The token name at the time was $GRAM. However, the following year in October 2019, he was accused by the US SEC of illegal fundraising. Therefore, in May 2020, Telegram founder Pavel Durov publicly announced that he would abandon the blockchain project TON and was fined US$18.5 million by the SEC.
In May 2020, TON technology research and development team TON Labs announced that the code of the TON project would be open sourced and the development of the project would be terminated. It agreed to pay the SEC a settlement of US$18.5 million and return the funds raised to investors. Subsequently, Free TON, a decentralized community composed of software developers, 13 validators and users, released a forked version of the “Free TON Blockchain” blockchain with the Token name “Ton Crystals”. However, Ton Crystals officially stopped updating and development for a long time.
In May 2021, the New Ton developer community spontaneously established by the Telegram community began to continue to study TON and promote the development of the TON project. The project has also changed from Telegram Open Network to The Open Network, and the token is TON. Then TON will be listed on various exchanges in November 2021, and the founder of Telegram publicly supports the TON project.
In August 2021, the TON/WETH trading pair was launched on the decentralized exchange Uniswap and began trading, and was launched on other DEXs and major CEXs in subsequent Q4 and 2022 (Binance is still not online as of November 2023).
In November 2021, at the climax of the last bull market, BTC rose to its highest point and then fell back. Then various Altcoins also began to make up for the last wave of gains. The price of TON rose rapidly from 0.8 USD to 4.5 USD and then fell back. In addition, the price of TON has remained relatively stable in the bear market, maintaining between 1 and 2.5 USD, and its market value continues to increase.
In April 2022, the TON Foundation announced the establishment of a US$250 million ecosystem fund “TONcoin Fund”, which received investment from exchanges and institutions such as Huobi, KuCoin, MEXC, 3Commas Capital, TON Miners and Kilo Funds. Subsequently, the TON Foundation announced that it would provide a wallet robot for Telegram, which means that Telegram users can send and receive TON and exchange other crypto assets directly in Telegram.
In July 2022, the TON Foundation established a new $90 million ecological fund TON Alpha-Vista. Investors in this fund include VistaLabs, Alphanonce, Miner’s Fund and Kilo Fund.
In September 2023, the short-term rapid rise in TON currency prices attracted a lot of attention in the market. At its peak, TON’s circulating market value reached US$9 billion, ranking ninth in the market value of all crypto assets.
Although TON encountered some regulatory and legal difficulties in previous years, it has received great attention and support from the blockchain and cryptocurrency communities, and has also received continued enthusiasm from the market in 2023. TON aims to provide Telegram’s more than 800 million users with fast, secure decentralized payments, digital identity and other services. TON hopes to scale to millions of transactions per second and support a decentralized ecosystem.
TON solves the scalability and interoperability issues of blockchain through its multi-blockchain architecture. Specifically, TON’s technical features can be divided into the following aspects:
a. Multi-chain architecture:The TON blockchain is a collection of blockchains, consisting of a three-level architecture of the main chain Masterchain, the work chain Workchain, and the shard chain Shardchain (the maximum number of work chains can reach 2^32, and other reference materials mention that it is 2^92 , the author checked the latest version of the white paper and believes that it should be the 32nd power. If it is not accurate, please contact us for modification). The main chain is the main blockchain that contains all information about the protocol and current parameters. The working chain is the blockchain that handles smart contract transactions. The working chain is further fragmented to become a shard chain. Through working chains and dynamic sharding TON can verify and process millions of transactions per second, quickly achieving massive scalability and interoperability regardless of network size, and between any two blockchains Instant transfer of messages.
Image source: CGV FoF (reproduced by Zonff Partners)
The main chain and working chain on TON are heterogeneous multi-chains. Different working chains may have different “rules”, that is, different account address formats, different transaction formats, different smart contract virtual machines (VMs), and different basic Cryptocurrencies etc. But they all meet certain basic interoperability standards to make interoperability between different work chains possible and relatively simple. In this regard, the heterogeneity of the TON blockchain is similar to the EOS and PolkaDot projects.
The working chain and sharding chain on TON are isomorphic multi-chains. Each working chain can be divided into up to 2^60 sharding blockchains, or sharding chains for short (some other reference materials mentioned that this is 2^64, the author After checking the latest version of the white paper, I think this should be the 60th power. If it is not accurate, please contact us for modification). Its rules and block format are the same as the working chain itself, but it is only responsible for a group of accounts, depending on the first few digits of the account address. Since all these shard chains share a common block format and rules, they are isomorphic, similar to what was discussed in the Ethereum scaling proposal.
b. Proof of Staking + Byzantine Fault Tolerant:The consensus algorithm used by TON is the same as that of Cosmos and Polkadot. According to the white paper, becoming a node does not require permission and only requires a certain number of tokens and ordinary IT operation and maintenance capabilities. There are four roles in the TON network: Validator, Nominator, Fisherman, and Collator. If a validator signs an invalid block candidate, it may be automatically punished, lose some or all of its pledges, or be temporarily suspended from the validator set for a period of time; in addition, the blessing of the BFT consensus mechanism guarantees Consensus will not branch and is more suitable for a “tightly coupled” multi-chain architecture.
c. Anonymous protection of account privacy:TON Proxy (Network Proxy/Anonymity Layer), similar to I2P (Invisible Internet Project), is used to hide identities and create decentralized virtual private networks (🪜) to protect online privacy. For example, account nodes with a large number of tokens, or high-risk blockchain verification nodes who want to hide their exact IP address and geographical location to resist DDoS attacks will value this feature.
d. FunC/Fift/TACT:FunC is a programming language for the TON Virtual Machine (TVM). This domain-specific, statically typed language is used to write smart contracts on the TON blockchain. In TON, FunC is usually not compiled directly into bytecode, but through another low-level Fift programming language. Just like FunC, Fift is another language designed specifically for the TON blockchain. Fift is a low-level language very close to TVM opcodes, specifically used to develop and manage TON blockchain smart contracts and interact with the TON virtual machine. For most developers, FunC and Fift are both relatively difficult, and the official has also launched the relatively easy TACT programming language for developers to use.
The TON team wrote a paper specifically explaining the differences between TON, Solana and Ethereum:
Image source: https://ton.org/zh/analysis
a. Block and finalization time
Users often focus on transaction speed and the speed of the blockchain. The faster blocks are built, the less time users have to wait for remittances and smart contract execution.
TON - TON generates a new block on each shard chain and the main chain approximately every 5 seconds. New blocks on all shard chains are generated almost simultaneously, while a new block on the main chain is generated approximately after one second because it must contain all The hash of the latest block of the shard chain.
ETH - Ethereum includes slots and epochs. A slot is a 12-second interval during which validators can propose new beacon chains and shard chains. 32 time slots make up an epoch (6.4 minutes), and there are specific rules that require at least 2 epochs for final confirmation of a block, which means that it takes at least 12.8 minutes to confirm a block.
Solana - Solana claims to be able to generate a block per second or faster, but it has an extended block finalization time. A block is typically finalized after 16 voting rounds, with each round expected to last approximately 400 milliseconds. This means a latency of 6.4 seconds.
b.Performance
Blockchain performance represents the platform’s ability to handle large-scale smart contracts, which is very important for complex blockchain products such as DeFi, GameFi, and DAO.
TON - TON is a Turing-complete high-performance blockchain that can adapt to any complex transactions on the main chain and all its working chains.
ETH - Ethereum only has a Turing-complete EVM on the beacon chain, and the network is limited to 15 transactions per second. The lack of cross-shard interaction means that other transactions cannot be executed in a truly decentralized environment.
Solana - Solana is Turing complete, but it only performs well on a few very simple predefined types of transactions (which only change account balances but not state), and only performs best when all account data fits in RAM (Some problems may arise if it does not fit).
c. Scalability
Scalability is directly related to the number of users and their interactions (transactions, smart contract executions, infrastructure requests).
TON - TON supports work chains and dynamic sharding. The system can accommodate up to 2^32 work chains, and each work chain can be subdivided into up to 2^60 shard chains, with almost instantaneous cross-shard and cross-sharding. Chain communication function enables millions of transactions per second.
ETH - Ethereum will support up to 64 shard chains and beacon chains. At this stage, it is unclear what the exact performance of the new 64 shard chains will be and how the shard chains will interact with each other. However, if messaging between shard chains is once introduced, you will have to wait 10 - 15 minutes until the shard chain block finalizes the emitted message before it can be processed on the other shard chain. Additionally, additional shards are not currently expected to be able to run EVM smart contracts. Instead, they are intended to be used as additional data storage in the distributed ledger.
Solana - Solana supports neither sharding nor work chains.
White Paper: Comparison of TON, Solana and Ethereum 2.0
The initial total supply of TON is 5 billion, with no upper limit on supply. The team owns 1.45% of the tokens, and the remaining 98.55% were mined by POW in the early stage. At present, the network consensus has been converted from POW to POS, and the total amount of TON is inflating at about 0.6% per year. These Tokens are used to reward validators who maintain network security. The creation and initial issuance of TON Token is very unique and in some ways similar to Bitcoin. In June 2020, all TON (98.55% of the total supply) was available for mining until June 28, 2022, when the last TON Token mined marked the successful end of TON IDO.
The main uses of TON Token in the network include paying transaction fees, securing the chain through staking, making decisions about the future of the network, and ultimately making payments. Additionally, TON Token is used to pay for decentralized data storage, pay to use TON proxies, pay for TON DNS, vote, reward validators, and more.
The current total supply of TON is approximately 5 billion, of which 1.08 billion are frozen in inactive wallets of early miners, approximately 470 million are pledged by POS validators, and the circulating supply is 3.53 billion TON.
Due to TON’s special historical reasons, unlike other new public chains, early investment institutions and project parties hold a large number of tokens and are held hostage by capital. The advantage is that you don’t have to worry about institutions unlocking and smashing the market, but the disadvantages are also very similar. In the early days, large miners held more concentrated coins, replacing institutions. Now the top 100 whale addresses hold more than 50% of the total amount of Tokens.
Image source: CoinmarketCap
In February 2023, TON VOTE passed a “TON Token Economic Model Optimization Proposal”, which proposed to temporarily freeze inactive mining wallets for 48 months. These wallets have never been activated and do not have any mining records in their history. Make a transfer. There are currently 171 inactive mining wallets. These 171 wallets hold a total of more than 1.081 billion TON, accounting for about 21% of the total TON supply at that time.
Image source: Tonwhales
Although the community’s vote to freeze inactive mining wallets for 48 months will temporarily alleviate this part of the selling pressure, due to the idea of decentralization, these wallets are unlikely to be permanently frozen. In comparison, the total amount of coins held by the top 100 Bitcoin addresses is only 13.63%. This unreasonable token distribution will pose a great threat to the TON ecosystem in the future.
In addition to temporarily freezing inactive wallets, the community also voted to reduce the circulating supply by burning half of the transaction fees, but currently only about 450 TON can be burned per day, which is simply a waste of the initial issuance of 5 billion. A drop in the bucket.
Image source: Tonstat
If you carefully observe the price of TON, you will find that there is a serious mismatch between its circulating market value and average daily trading volume. TON currently ranks 11th in circulating market value and 139th in trading volume, and this market value is only the circulating market value, not FDV , if all TON are included, the total market value of FDV will exceed 10 billion US dollars. Since the price of TON was initially listed on Uniswap in August 2021, except for the rapid price rise to $4.5 in November 2021 in conjunction with the favorable environment of the bull market, and then quickly falling back, its price has been maintained between 1 - 2.5 USD, even if In the bear market, it has never fallen below the issue price of 0.5. The author believes that this is because during the bear market, retail investors do not have any TON Coins in their hands to smash, so there will not be a continuous downward trend in currency prices like many other public chains in the bear market. In addition, it can be seen that the circulating market value of TON has remained at a high value of more than one billion U.S. dollars since 2022, but its average daily transaction volume is even as low as several million U.S. dollars. Compared with the same period last year, Solana, which has maintained a market capitalization of several billions since the bear market, has an average daily trading volume of several hundred million US dollars. TON’s average daily trading volume is not even one-tenth of Solana’s.
TON’s concentrated position distribution and large potential selling pressure pose a great psychological obstacle to the entry and exchange of hands by large funds and institutions. Combined with the current low trading volume, it is difficult to conduct a reasonable valuation. It is expected that in the future many adjustments to the chip structure and circulation mechanism will be needed to stimulate trading volume so that the market can establish more stable expectations.
The steady rise in TON prices in the short and medium term is most likely the result of the market value management team cooperating with the favorable ecological hype. It is not a bad thing to manage the market value of a public chain like TON. Good and stable currency price performance is also conducive to the long-term and stable expansion of the Telegram ecosystem of the TON public chain, and the ecological development will not be affected by the sudden rise and fall of currency prices. Solana’s currency price performance in the last cycle reached a maximum circulation market value of US$80 billion with the cooperation of the market value management team. Therefore, market value management is a favorable factor for the short- and medium-term price of TON. However, in the long run, since the top 100 whale addresses hold more than 50% of the total token supply, TON also has hidden dangers of centralization and potential huge selling pressure. People who hold more TON Coin can control the 100 Monitor the address settings on each chain.
It is also worth noting that well-known market maker DWF Labs announced in June that it will contribute to the token economics, market making and liquidity provision of the TON ecosystem. Moreover, as of November 2023, among the top 100 currencies by market capitalization, apart from the platform coins of other exchanges and BSV, only TON has not yet been listed on Binance, which also leaves a new round of growth expectations for TON.
According to ton.app statistics, there are currently 551 Apps in the Ton ecosystem, which is not a small number for a public chain that has not yet exploded; however, there are only 9 Apps included in DefiLlama, and the number one Bemo accounts for more than half of the TVL (7.3M). Most of them are non-financial products, which is also in line with Ton’s positioning and expectations, and is a good testing ground for non-financial products.
Image source: https://ton.app/
a. The huge payment ecosystem contained in the combination of Telegram and TON
At the recent Token2049 Summit, Telegram officially announced a partnership with the TON Foundation. Telegram will integrate the self-hosted encryption wallet “TON Space” launched by TON, allowing Wallet to be accessed directly in the Telegram menu, completing the Crypto self-cycle. Telegram has a large user base worldwide, with 1.3 billion registered users, many of whom hail from Russia, Iran, India and other Asian and European countries. According to Telegram’s founder, he said in his personal channel on July 18, Telegram has more than 2.5 million new users registering every day, and its monthly active users have exceeded 800 million.
Data compiled by statista in January 2023 shows that this number is 1.4 times that of ). Telegram is currently one of the must-have Crypto apps and has a huge Crypto user base.
TON Space users can seamlessly connect to TON ecological applications through Telegram accounts. Users can directly connect to TON Space from TON-based decentralized applications (dApps) and enjoy the functions and services it provides. TON Space acts as a blockchain account supporting assets such as TON in the ecosystem. Some people compare TON Space to Telegram and WeChat Pay to Tencent to illustrate the importance of this cooperation.
As early as April 2022, the TON Foundation announced that it would provide Telegram with a new wallet robot @wallet. Users can send and receive Toncoin and purchase Bitcoin directly in Telegram. This means that users do not need to enter a lengthy wallet address and wait for verification to complete the transaction.
In September 2023, the TON Foundation announced that it would launch TON Space, a self-hosted digital wallet based on Telegram, globally in November. TON Space accounts provide self-custody services, and third parties cannot access users’ assets, ensuring a certain level of security. TON Space is built into Wallet after its launch. The built-in non-custodial wallet does not require the introduction of a third-party payment and settlement platform. While avoiding the risk of jumping to other platforms for transactions, it also enhances the crypto-financial attributes of the Telegram platform itself.
Currently, Telegram can directly call out the wallet without any downloading and allows depositing assets such as usdt/ton/btc for transactions.
Telegram’s current payment function allows users to send TON and BTC to friends directly in the app’s chat room. The usage is the same as WeChat Pay. This convenient payment experience has greatly empowered TON. Many public chains may have a complete ecology but do not have a usage scenario for traditional users, making it difficult to get out of the circle. However, TON was born with the protection of Telegram and enjoys the hundreds of millions of traditional traffic and the most direct application scenarios brought by Telegram.
b. Sluggish DeFi ecosystem
In contrast to the huge empowerment that Telegram itself brings to TON, the current DeFi lock-up amount of TON is very low, only 9.2 million US dollars. There are only 9 apps included in DefiLlama, and the number one app, Bemo, accounts for more than half of the TVL (7.3M). You know, even a public chain like EOS, which is about to rot, has a TVL of more than $69 million.
Different from other Layer1, TON’s development route may not rely on increasing the amount of TVL in the DeFi ecosystem on the chain, but rather through Telegram payment, robots (TG Bot), mini games (similar to mini programs in the WeChat ecosystem), etc. as the main development game road. Therefore, judging the valuation of TON through the traditional Mcap/TVL on-chain asset lock-up calculation method may be less accurate. The core advantage of TON is its close integration with the Telegram ecosystem, which has a MAU of 800 million, making it the traffic entry point for a large number of Web2 users to enter the encryption ecosystem. In the next cycle, many new projects will appear in the GameFi and SocialFi sectors with Ponzi attributes, and the TON ecosystem with huge Web2 traffic may become the focus of these projects.
Data source: DeFiLlama data as of October 18, 2023
At the same time, users who have used Telegram’s payment ecosystem should be able to feel the convenience it brings. Payment is often accompanied by huge financial infrastructure needs, such as stablecoins, DEX, lending, cross-chain bridges, etc. However, this part is not yet complete in the TON ecosystem, so it is also a direction that many entrepreneurial projects can try. In this regard, TON’s DeFi ecology can be promoted according to the development model of other mature public chains, and does not require DeFi innovation or a complex EVM ecosystem.
c. Rapidly developing TG Bot track
In addition to the potential payment ecosystem opportunities brought about by the combination of TON and Telegram mentioned above, the robot (TG Bot) track is also likely to be a breaking point. Since May 2023, the Bot track has seen a steady upward trend in terms of transaction volume, business revenue, and the number of new users. The top three, Maestro, Banana Gun, and Unibot, all showed good trading volumes in the bear market. Unibot’s Token price has also increased tenfold in the bear market, and Maestro, which ranks first, has achieved an outstanding result of daily revenue of US$54K (DeFiLlama data; Maestro has not yet issued coins).
The explosion of the Bot ecosystem is inseparable from the empowerment of Telegram itself. The model in which users use Bots in Telegram to find and follow Smart Money transactions to make profits is one of the few positive ways to make profits in the bear market. In addition, many senior Web3 users on Twitter have a positive view of the TG Bot track, and have begun to use functions such as setting up on-chain monitoring and warnings in Telegram. Traditional on-chain monitoring is often nested in wallets, data websites, and self-made monitoring software, and the user habits of these channels are gradually being broken by Telegram. Users can directly integrate various functions such as information acquisition, user communication, data monitoring, payment transfer, and Crypto financial management on Telegram through TON.
Data source: Dune Analytics
In addition, Telegram’s potential future integration with games, social networking, NFT and other fields may still lead to new product models. These are all possible future empowerment targets of TON. Such as the game ecology of WeChat mini games, Telegram can also derive many similar gameplays in the future. The rapid integration of @wallet with small games has even directly bypassed the restrictions on legal currency deposits and withdrawals in games around the world (compliance has yet to be discussed), greatly lowering the entry threshold for the GameFi ecosystem for many small game developers. The Axie and StepN modes in the last cycle can still be implemented through new simple gameplay on Telegram. For the Social track led by Friend.tech and the NFT track led by Opensea and Blur, in the traditional model, users often need to switch to B after discovering a certain product (such as a popular NFT) on a social platform. platform to participate or purchase. Telegram, because of its integration with TON Space, allows users to directly discover a product on a social platform and complete the participation or purchase directly, which greatly lowers the threshold for user participation and developer development.
d. Development tools and developer ecosystem
At present, TON officially relies on a lot of support from developers, including building Telegram Mini Apps and smart contracts.
Telegram Mini Apps are web applications that run inside Telegram Messenger. They are built using web technologies (HTML, CSS and JavaScript). Developers can create interfaces using JavaScript, the most widespread programming language. Here are some key points about Telegram Mini Apps:
Smart contract creation, development, and deployment on the TON blockchain leverage the FunC programming language and the TON Virtual Machine (TVM). FunC is a domain-specific, C-like statically typed language. The developer’s FunC program is compiled into Fift assembly code and generates the corresponding bytecode for the TON virtual machine. This bytecode (actually a tree of cells, like any other data in the TON blockchain) can be used to create smart contracts in the blockchain, or can be run on a local instance of TVM. Interested developers can find more specific development tool information on the TON official website.
In addition, TON Foundation also provides Grants programs to many developers, focusing on the development of DeFi, Gamefi, cross-chain middleware, development tools, DAO governance tools and other fields. For example, Tali AI, TonUp, Oputs DEX Aggregator, Gatto, etc. are all projects that will receive Grants from the TON Foundation in the third quarter of 2023. Developers who are interested in building projects in the TON ecosystem may wish to apply.
All in all, TON is a good testing ground for non-financial products, which is hugely different from foreign public chain products. Although TON encountered many difficulties in its early development, and was fined hugely by the SEC and returned US$1.2 billion in investment funds, etc., its subsequent development still did many things right: issuing coins at the end of the bull market at the end of 2021 and taking advantage of the favorable environment It created a wave of rapid rise, and then maintained the high market value of TON price with low liquidity through strong market control, and after the bear market began in 2022, it successively landed on major exchanges to expand liquidity. In addition, through the combination of TON and Telegram ecology, payment and other sectors will be combined to form an ecology, and TG’s huge Web2 traffic will be used to divert traffic to TON. To sum up, the development of TON in the next bull market is still worth looking forward to.
Note: The projects mentioned in the article do not constitute any investment advice. The article only represents the current personal views of the author and does not represent Zonff Partners. The information and opinions published in the article may no longer be accurate due to changes in circumstances or other factors after the date of publication.
If you have any suggestions on the content of this article, please leave your contact information for further discussion.
TON Whitepaper:https://docs.ton.org/ton.pdf
Telegram to Return $1.2 Billion to Investors and Pay $18.5 Million Penalty to Settle SEC Chargeshttps://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2020-146
Comparison of TON, Solana and Ethereum 2.0https://ton.org/comparison_of_blockchains.pdf
TON Blockchain Analysishttps://ton.org/zh/analysis
Fift: A Brief Introductionhttps://ton.org/fiftbase.pdf
CGV Research: Telegram Open Network’s technological advancement and future prospects https://www.chaincatcher.com/article/2102648
Blockchain thinking: Detailed explanation of The Open Network Is TON, which no one cares about, on the eve of a surge? https://www.theblockbeats.info/news/44943?search=1
Day: Backed by 800 million monthly active social giants, will the TON ecosystem be “a flash in the pan” or “progress rapidly” https://www.bitget.com/zh-CN/news/detail/12560603814344