Editor's Note from PANews: PANews reported on October 11th that the TON Foundation plans to apply for the Guinness World Record for "fastest blockchain" and will start performance testing on October 31st to demonstrate the reliability, scalability, and speed of the TON blockchain. This article will analyze TON from a technical perspective and explore the basis for its Guinness World Record application.

By Beosin

In 2018, the Telegram team launched a revolutionary public chain project called TON, which attracted a lot of attention upon its release due to the huge potential user base in Web2.

TON's development has experienced several twists and turns. In 2023, TON launched a DeFi liquidity incentive program and hosted the Hack-a-TON hackathon to attract top developers worldwide to inject new vitality into the TON ecosystem and explore cutting-edge technologies such as DeFi and NFT. Today, it is becoming a rapidly growing and vibrant ecosystem.

TON Development History

In 2018, the Telegram team founded the Telegram Open Network project and raised approximately $1.7 billion through an ICO. However, Telegram was later accused by the SEC of illegal fundraising. In 2020, the Telegram team agreed to pay a $18.5 million fine to settle with the SEC, abandoned the Telegram Open Network project, and refunded the funds.

Subsequently, the Telegram team locked all tokens in the Telegram Open Network network into smart contracts, allowing anyone to participate in mining TON tokens (mining ended in June 2022, and the TON network has fully transitioned to PoS). Telegram handed over the Telegram Open Network to the community, and it was continued to be developed by developers from the NewTON community, which was later renamed the TON Foundation. The Telegram Open Network was also renamed The Open Network, which is the current TON public chain.

In 2020, while Telegram awaited the SEC's ruling, TON Labs forked the Telegram Open Network and released the "Free TON" version, which has since been renamed Everscale. Its development roadmap and code are significantly different from the original TON.

TON On-Chain Data

Currently, there are 357 validators on the chain, with a total staked amount of over 500 million TON under the PoS mechanism, distributed across 24 countries.

https://www.tonstat.com/#toncoin

The TON network currently has a staking amount of nearly 4 million US dollars, with an APR of approximately 5%. On June 17th, the TON community proposed a mechanism to destroy 50% of all transaction fees on the TON network to reduce the supply of TON tokens.

source: https://www.tonstake.com/#/

Over the past year, the number of active addresses in the TON ecosystem has been steadily increasing. As of October 6th, there were 817,640 active addresses on the chain. The number of on-chain transfers has also increased this year, and the number of TON accounts has grown to over 3.5 million, indicating that developers and users are gradually exploring this ecosystem.

TON Token Data

$TON has token contracts on both the ETH and BSC chains. According to data from the EagleEye platform, on September 17th, there was a short-term peak in on-chain transactions of $TON, with a Buy/Sell Ratio close to 1.17. The price of $TON reached a recent high of 2.6 US dollars on September 20th.

source: https://eagleeye.space/detail/toncoin

In addition, the EagleEye platform monitored a very active trading of $TON on the centralized exchange MEXC recently. On October 5th, TON announced that it had received a tens of millions of dollars investment from MEXC Ventures and established a strategic partnership. MEXC will provide marketing services and promotion for the TON ecosystem and offer $TON staking and borrowing services.

source: https://eagleeye.space/detail/toncoin

TON Design Features

1. Asynchronous Invocation of Smart Contracts

Unlike public chains like Ethereum, the invocation of smart contracts between TON is asynchronous. This design improves scalability because when one smart contract calls a function of another smart contract, the call does not execute immediately, and there is no need to process all transactions in a block. However, the asynchrony also increases the threshold for developers to develop and maintain applications on the TON chain.

2. Infinite Sharding

The TON blockchain is designed to be divided into three types of chains: the master chain, working chains, and shard chains.

source: Beosin

The master chain contains working chains, shard information, and the recent block hashes of working chains and shard chains.

There can be up to 2^32 working chains, each identified by an unsigned 32-bit integer workchain_id. Different working chains can have different address formats, transaction formats, virtual machines, etc. However, different working chains must meet the basic interoperability standards of the TON blockchain. TON's design for working chains is similar to Polkadot.

For each working chain, it can be divided into up to 2^60 shard chains as needed. Shard chains only need to be responsible for maintaining and transferring the state of one or more accounts and exchanging information with other shard chains. The shard chains in TON's design are essentially "account chains."

Through this design, TON has achieved an "infinite sharding paradigm" to meet the goal of future millions of TPS.

3. Distributed Hash Table

The way blockchain networks store and access data can affect the network's data consistency, accessibility, and security. TON uses a hash table for data storage.

First, a hash table is a data structure that uses a hash function to map keys to buckets for fast data access. In TON, the hash table is distributed, meaning that data is stored on multiple nodes in the network.

When storing a data item, TON uses a hash function to determine which node should store the data item.

When retrieving data, the same hash function is used to quickly locate the node storing the data, allowing for efficient data insertion, deletion, and retrieval operations.

Data is encrypted and redundantly stored on multiple nodes, ensuring data security and persistence even if some nodes fail or are attacked. Compared to traditional hash tables, distributed hash tables provide higher performance and reliability in distributed and large-scale environments.

Here is a comparison of TON with the Ethereum and Bitcoin networks:

4. Privacy Protection

TON Proxy is a network proxy anonymity service used to hide the IP addresses of TON nodes, similar to I2P (Invisible Internet Project), to build a decentralized VPN service. It combines TON DNS and TON P2P networks to protect user privacy.

The "Secret Chats" feature introduced in Telegram uses end-to-end encryption technology to enhance the security of message transmission between users. In late 2022, Telegram further updated and introduced blockchain-based anonymous number login, allowing users to log in without a phone number, only using the mnemonic phrase of the TON wallet, providing an additional privacy option.

In January 2023, TON further expanded its functionality by releasing TON Storage. This is a peer-to-peer file sharing system with some similarities to Dropbox and torrents. It simplifies the file exchange process and provides encrypted protection for files stored on the blockchain. Additionally, to ensure the persistent storage of files, the operators hosting these files can also receive corresponding incentives.

TON Development Language

When developing smart contracts on TON, developers have three programming languages to choose from: Fift, FunC, and Tact. Fift is low-level, containing TVM and Fift assembly instructions, making it more difficult for developers to use Fift for smart contract development. Tact is a new high-level language in TON, with syntax similar to Typescript, aimed at reducing development difficulty. Currently, the most widely used development language is FunC, a programming language similar to C.

source: Beosin

When developing TON smart contracts, the Beosin security team recommends developers to pay attention to the following 7 points:

1. Both FunC and Tact are statically typed languages, and developers need to be very clear about the data types stored in their code. Reading unexpected types and values can cause errors.

2. The TON blockchain does not include revert messages. Therefore, developers need to consider the end paths of their code execution.

3. The TON blockchain has multiple transaction stages: the computational phase, actions phase, and bounce phase. The computational phase executes contract code, and the actions phase sends messages. Therefore, developers need to pay attention to which stage the transaction execution is currently in when testing their code.

4. Functions with the method_id identifier in FunC can be used to receive internal and external messages from the blockchain.

5. TON blockchain is asynchronous, and developers need to handle failed call information.

6. Pay attention to the code for handling bounced messages in smart contracts. If a smart contract sends a bounced message with TON assets to another account, it is recommended to deduct gas fees in the smart contract.

7. For external messages, developers need to be aware of the risk of replay attacks. This can be avoided by setting counters or identifiers to prevent replay attacks.

TON Ecosystem

The TON ecosystem currently has 551 apps distributed across more than 19 subfields.

Wallets

Ton Space is an unmanaged wallet in @wallet, the native wallet embedded in Telegram, which can be used to import existing TON blockchain wallets or create new ones. Users can choose to save their private keys with their TG accounts and email, and perform NFT viewing, sending, and trading. Ton Space will soon support more features, including DeFi applications such as DEX, staking, and lending protocols, and users can access third-party dApps on TON using TON Connect.

https://wallet.tg/

The most widely supported TON blockchain wallet platform is Tonkeeper, which supports both web and mobile platforms. On the mobile platform, users can view the NFTs they hold on the TON blockchain. It's worth noting that TON's wallet is a smart contract wallet, providing the potential for more complex applications in addition to enabling more sharding for the TON network.

https://tonkeeper.com/

DEX

Currently, there are 6 major decentralized exchanges in the TON ecosystem, including Megaton Finance, ION Finance, DeDust, STON.fi, Flex, and Tegro Finance. These DEXs have different user focuses, with Ston.fi and DeDust having the largest user base for swaps, while DeDust and Megaton have more active users.

Megaton Finance has the highest TVL, with approximately $5 million, supporting the exchange of all major tokens in the TON ecosystem. The largest liquidity pool is the oUSDT-oUSDC stablecoin pool, accounting for about 40% of its TVL.

https://megaton.fi/pool

In addition, the decentralized order book exchange Storm Trade is currently in testing and supports both web and Telegram bot modes. In the future, users will be able to interact directly using the bot developed by Storm Trade.

Lending

The first lending project on the TON chain, Evaa Protocol, is expected to launch its beta version on October 10th. On July 19th, Evaa Protocol announced TONcoin.fund as its strategic investor, and on October 2nd, it completed a private financing of $130,000 on the Tonstarter platform. The addition of the lending protocol Evaa Protocol will benefit the asset liquidity of the TON ecosystem.

https://evaa.finance/

Cross-Chain Bridges

Currently, the official TON cross-chain bridge supports asset transfers between TON and ETH, and between TON and BSC, while bridges to other chains are still under development.

In addition, third-party cross-chain bridges include Orbit Bridge, Wallet Bridge, and Tontake Bridge. Orbit Bridge and Megaton Finance are developed by the team behind the DEX platform KlaySwap on the Korean public chain Klaytn, supporting cross-chain transfers for 11 public chains. Wallet Bridge and Tontake Bridge are in the form of Telegram bots, but have fewer users, so users should be aware of interaction risks.

Data Platform

re:doubt is a data analysis platform on TON, positioned as a combination of CoinMarketCap and Dune Analytics, providing rich data on the TON ecosystem for both regular users and crypto analysts.

https://beta.redoubt.online/

The development team Devnull won second prize in the Beosin-supported Hack-a-Ton hackathon in July this year and will support more TON-related data analysis in the future.

TON Present and Future

Currently, the overall user count for DEX in the TON ecosystem is approximately 25,000, with over 2,300 LPs (liquidity providers) and a TVL (Total Value Locked) of 5 million $TON. The current TVL is only around $10 million, compared to the TVL of over a billion dollars on other well-known public chains, indicating that the potential of the TON ecosystem needs to be further explored.

In the future, to overcome the challenges in the development of the DeFi ecosystem, TON will need native stablecoins and more liquidity support in addition to liquidity incentives. Currently, stablecoins on the TON chain include oUSDT, oUSDC, jUSDT, and jUSDC, but the liquidity of these tokens is insufficient, resulting in significant slippage and reducing the enthusiasm for users to trade on the TON chain. With the launch of more cross-chain bridges in the future, there will be more types of stablecoins on the TON chain to promote the increase of its TVL.

In terms of mobile applications, TON benefits from Telegram's support, as various applications' Telegram bots can be well integrated into Telegram, greatly reducing the interaction steps for users. Currently, DeFi projects such as ION Finance and Storm Trade are developing their own Telegram bots, and popular Telegram trading bots like Unibot and Banana Gun can easily support trading of TON ecosystem tokens in the future.

In conclusion, with the gradual development of the ecosystem and the advantages of TON in the mobile space, TON still has great potential and a significant opportunity to attract a large number of users to participate in its ecosystem in the future.

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