TON (The Open Network) is pushing the potential of blockchain technology to new heights. Originally developed by the Telegram Messenger development team and later taken over by the community, TON aims to build a fast, secure, and scalable blockchain network. As a cutting-edge blockchain project, TON has attracted numerous developers and users with its high performance and flexibility, particularly with its potential to reach millions of TPS. With the continuous growth of its ecosystem and ongoing technological iterations, TON is poised to become a significant player in crypto space, promoting the adoption and development of decentralized applications in the future. It is worth noting that on September 6, 2024, OKX Web3 officially launched its new App Connect protocol, with current support for the TON ecosystem and upcoming expansion to popular networks such as EVM and Solana. This upgrade enables developers to seamlessly access the OKX App wallet directly via the Telegram Mini App for signing transactions and other DApp interactions. By integrating with App Connect, developers can efficiently build their own DApps on TON and Telegram, streamlining the development process and laying the groundwork for a more robust Web3 ecosystem. This issue is the second in the "Developer Stories" series, providing insights into the TON world from the perspectives of TON core developers and the OKX Web3 technical team. The topics covered in this issue include TON's technological advancements, developer support, community governance, ecosystem security, and more, aiming to understand the insights and plans of TON core developers from a deep level.
TL;DR
The ultimate goal of TON is to drive the widespread adoption of the crypto industry and decentralized technology, rather than chasing short-term trends; our clear short-term objective is to achieve 500 million monthly active users within five years.
I urge Solidity developers: if you don’t want to end up like Prolog or Fortran programmers - left behind in history, embrace new innovations without fear.
On September 6, 2024, OKX Web3 launched the new App Connect protocol, currently supporting the TON ecosystem, with plans to expand to popular networks like EVM and Solana soon.
Telegram Mini App developers aren’t confined to the TON chain; they have the freedom to choose any blockchain.
All services and products in the TON network have been fully developed by the community in a decentralized manner, with our core team only responsible for implementing the blockchain kernel.
I believe that in the future, only Bitcoin and TON will persist, while other blockchains appear outdated due to slow development cycles and unclear goals.
We hold Bitcoin and Ethereum in high regard for pioneering the crypto era, but frankly, they haven’t made significant strides in bringing the general public on-chain.
Beyond providing a platform for excellent projects within the TON ecosystem, OKX Web3 also leverages technology to foster positive development in TON.
Currently, we at TON Core are not standard-setters but pioneers in the field.
We need to focus on ordinary users who are unfamiliar with blockchain; a user might find that a TON passport with visa-free access to 256 countries far more appealing than yet another complex farming protocol.
OKX Web3 offers OKX OS services, providing TON developers with a complete suite of development tools, SDKs, APIs, and documentation, significantly streamlining the development process. Developers can quickly build their applications on TON and integrate with the OKX Web3 wallet for an all-in-one solution for project deployment and operations.
The technical innovations and latest improvements of TON that made onchain games popular
TON Core Developer Anatoly Makosov：The reason why games with tens or hundreds of millions of users choose TON is because TON seems to be the only blockchain that can handle such loads. Admittedly, it wasn't without its challenges, but eventually we got all these game launches done. On 16 May, Notcoin, a game project with 35 million users, minted its coins on the TON blockchain and simultaneously listed on the world's top exchanges, including Binance. In the first day alone, the blockchain welcomed one million new onchain Notcoin holders. We should also mention the Avacoin minting (the project has 6M monthly active users) and the DOGS minting (50M monthly active users) in July and August. Next up this year are the initial coin minting on TON from gaming giants Hamster Kombat (239 million players), TapSwap (56 million players) and others. These are impressive numbers even by Web2 standards and we feel like real pioneers. TON has an asynchronous architecture and is able to dynamically shard under load. However, in practice, of course, there are some problems with implementation and infrastructure and we try to eliminate them promptly to keep up with the ever-increasing load. We release scheduled kernel updates every 1-2 months, some of them managed to improve resource consumption and performance of some parts by dozens of times. We plan to release a major “Accelerator” kernel update this year, as well as update the decentralised system of penalties for weak validators, which will encourage network validators not to save on hardware. We pride ourselves on our fixed network fees system, which does not fluctuate based on network load. If the Toncoin price rises, fees can be reduced by a network-wide vote, as we demonstrated this year. OKX Web3 TON integration lead Wang:In my perspective, the rapid growth of on-chain games within the TON ecosystem can be primarily attributed to two key technological factors: First, TON’s deep integration with Telegram and the TON Connect protocol offers a unique advantage. Users can easily access on-chain games and DApps via Telegram, lowering entry barriers and driving user growth. Second, TON’s sharding technology enhances network throughput and scalability, crucial for handling high-concurrency demands like micro-transactions and real-time interactions in games. This ensures a stable, smooth gaming experience even with high user volumes. These innovations strongly support the development of on-chain games in the TON ecosystem.
Why does TON ecosystem explode from GameFi instead of DeFi?
TON Core Developer Anatoly Makosov： The goal of the TON project is mass adoption of cryptocurrencies and decentralised technologies. That's why we always focus not on trends in the crypto industry, but on the needs of ordinary users. It's surprising to me why other blockchains are almost entirely focused on the speculative component of cryptocurrencies. You know, speculators and traders are not a very large part of the world's population . TON has all these tools: DEX's, Lendings, Liquid Stakings, etc, but guys, let's be consistent. In other blockchains, average users can't even figure out how to just send coins to each other. Let's solve this problem first. This year we launched USDT on TON, which was the most successful USDT launch in history according to Paolo Ardoino - due to low blockchain fees independent of network load, integration into the wallet directly in Telegram and the ability to pay network fees in USDT itself.
What does TON bring to developers (while others don't)?
TON Core Developer Anatoly Makosov：I believe the main force attracting developers is the ever-growing audience of TON users (the number of accounts on the blockchain has increased more than 10 times since the beginning of the year from 4 million to 53 million) and the emergence of tools that allow developers to create Mini Apps in Telegram and simply link them to the TON blockchain and TON wallets via TON Connect. This gives blockchain developers access to Telegram's nearly one billion audience. We cannot be compatible with EVM because they are different architectures: EVM is non-scalable synchronous and TVM is scalable and asynchronous. But if you take the programmers of the whole world, there are very few Solidity programmers. We are targeting ordinary users who are not yet familiar with blockchain, not traders. And we are also targeting ordinary developers on Java, Python, C++, JavaScript, etc. who are not yet familiar with blockchain, not a micro-percentage of Solidity developers. We have our own development tools and programming languages because the asynchronous TON is different from the synchronous blockchains of the previous generation. This allows developers to make scalable decentralised products. Some developers are too lazy to learn new things. But sometime before blockchains, programmers also switched from single-threaded languages to multi-threaded programming. I appeal to Solidity programmers - if you don't want to stay on the back of history as a Prolog or Fortran programmer - don't be afraid of the new. We are constantly developing our own development tools and languages. Alexander Kirsanov, formerly the maintener of the KPHP language, and Anton Trunov, formerly the creator of the Scilla language for the Zilliqa blockchain, have joined TON. We intend to show big updates at our Gateway conference this autumn.
The Telegram + TON ecosystem is constantly compared to WeChat and WeChat does lots of things by itself. What's the division of labor between the TON Foudation/Core Team and the TON Community?
TON Core Developer Anatoly Makosov：At this stage, all services and products in TON are already developed by the community in a decentralised way. The core team only does the implementation of the blockchain kernel and offers network guidelines, providing a platform for the community. The Telegram team makes a great messenger with lots of features and provides a public Bots API and Mini Apps API. OKX Web3 TON integration lead Wang:Indeed, TON needs to focus more on the development of its underlying protocols, especially in terms of infrastructure. Compared to mature public chains like Ethereum, there is still room for improvement. In the future, as TON’s infrastructure continues to improve, it will not only help attract more developers to the TON ecosystem but also pave the way for broader application scenarios.
Do developers have to use TON when building on Telegram?
TON Core Developer Anatoly Makosov：There is no such obligation for developers, they can choose any blockchain. For example, the HOT project running on Telegram initially chose the Near blockchain, but they failed the initial minting, overloading the Near blockchain in such a way that there was no single way to continue the minting. So the HOT project has now switched to TON 😁. To answer the second question - by a viral component it is easier for those products that choose to launch on Telegram to gain a sufficient audience. OKX Web3 TON integration lead Wang:Although Telegram-based startups are not required to use the TON blockchain, many are choosing other public chains like EVM. However, projects on TON benefit from its deep integration with Telegram, offering key advantages. The seamless connection simplifies the user experience, boosts acquisition and engagement, and leverages Telegram’s large user base and social features to promote project growth more effectively.
The current and future status of TON among all blockchains
TON Core Developer Anatoly Makosov：We follow our own path and do not look around. We are distinctive and that attracts innovators with fresh ideas more than crypto-scammers. At the same time, crypto-trends do not bypass TON - we have had waves of inscriptions and memecoins boom and the rest. TON is community driven. No one, including the Core team, has the tools to change anything on the blockchain on their own. We can only offer the community options to improve the network. The voting functionality is built into the kernel of the TON blockchain, as a decentralised project should be. Major changes go through voting on the ton.vote platform and then through validator voting. I think only Bitcoin and TON will remain in the future. The other blockchains look outdated - too slow development cycle and unclear goals. TON has a clear goal - 500 million monthly active users on TON in 5 years. We are consistently moving towards this goal - since the beginning of this year, the number of active users per month has grown more than 20 times (from 221K MAU to 4.5M MAU).
What has TON contributed to the standardization of the industry?
TON Core Developer Anatoly Makosov：I don't feel the industry has reached the point of standardisation. Much respect to Bitcoin and Ethereum - they started the crypto industry. But let's be honest - they haven't achieved anything in terms of mass adoption. Now we at TON Core are not standardisers, but pioneers. Our developments will become an industry standard later. But there is a place where we would like to introduce a standard now. Last autumn we ran a blockchain performance test and showed 100K TPS of complex smart contract execution, which is a world record. What we've run into is that there is no single system for measuring and comparing blockchains performance. CertiK, a well-known auditor who cross-checked our results, created a leaderboard in his system. This could become something like a Guinness Book of World Records for blockchains. TON is a Proof-of-stake blockchain with its own Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) consensus protocol called Catchain. This year we have reached 400 independent validators on the network and 600M TON (over 10% of total supply) are involved in validation to guarantee the correctness of the network. Despite the fact that in all this time there have been no hacks of the TON kernel or smart contracts that the core team has written - we don't fall into overconfidence. In addition to thorough and lengthy testing by the core team, we collaborate with the world's best auditors, and actively use bug bounties among the community. For example, the smart contract for USDT has been tested by Trail of Bits, Zellic and a public cracking contest in addition to the core team testing and review.
What are some areas that interest you for the mass-adoption of TON?
TON Core Developer Anatoly Makosov：We need to focus on the needs of the average user who is not yet familiar with blockchain. Perhaps such a user will find some kind of TON Passport with visa-free entry to 256 countries more popular than another tricky farming protocol. This year a new TON wallet smart contract v5.0 has been developed that will allow two-factor authorisation, social key recovery in case of loss, as well as already allowing for gasless transactions (not requiring Toncoin to pay for network costs). We have now made a TON Mintless Token technology that allows projects to instantly distribute coins to hundreds of millions of users and it will cost less than a dollar of network costs. There are certainly many challenges ahead of us, technical and non-technical. It is difficult to single out one thing - we need to improve the kernel, infrastructure, APIs and apps. We need to rethink the UX and user interfaces several more times before they become understandable to everyone. TON has an inherently scalable architecture and good technology and a rocket launcher in the form of Telegram, so we'll solve all these challenges. Many other blockchain projects have neither. OKX Web3 TON integration lead Wang:I am particularly interested in the development of TON’s smart contract wallets. The latest v5 contract version introduces features like gasless transactions and off-chain calls, which pave the way for broader Web2 use cases. While similar to the EIP-4337 wallet, it offers unique advantages that improve the user-friendliness, flexibility, and security of TON wallets. When users can seamlessly use TON wallets, combined with Telegram’s large Web2 user base, it will significantly boost the widespread adoption of TON.
What has OKX Web3 done to build the TON ecosystem?
First, as the leading Web3 product, OKX Wallet has integrated the TON chain ecosystem, allowing users to manage TON assets seamlessly, engage in cross-chain swaps, interact with NFTs, DeFi, and access TON DApps on both mobile and desktop. OKX Web3 has also collaborated with many top TON projects and The Open League to launch events like Giveaways and Cryptopedia, driving traffic to quality projects and onboarding more users into the TON ecosystem. Second, OKX Web3 is advancing TON development by working with core developers to push TON Enhancement Proposals (TEPs), improving the infrastructure for smoother application building. Through the OKX OS service, developers gain access to a full suite of tools, SDKs, APIs, and documentation, simplifying the development process and enabling seamless integration with the OKX Wallet. Third, OKX Ventures, the investment arm of OKX, has partnered with TON Venture to establish a fund that invests in and incubates TON projects, offering financial support and resources to help startups grow on the TON network. In summary, OKX Web3 is dedicated to driving blockchain innovation and mass adoption, with the TON ecosystem being a key focus. Our collaboration aims to support the growth of more projects while providing users with top-tier support and developer tools. And, OKX Web3’s technology and resources are open to developers across all public chains. Moving forward, we will continue optimizing our products to offer better services for users and developers, promoting real-world use cases and attracting more participants to the Web3 ecosystem.
About the "Developer Stories"Series
About the "Developer Stories"SeriesWeb3 developers have made significant contributions to the advancement of the crypto industry. Their innovation and technical capabilities have injected lasting vitality and motivation into the entire industry, not only improving the technology itself but also providing support for future applications and business models. However, despite their active contributions, they often receive little to no attention. The "Developer Stories" series, launched by OKX Web3 in collaboration with Chain Catcher, aims to help readers understand the roadmaps, technical insights, latest trends, market dynamics, and comments on hot topics of the day from the perspectives of different chains' core developers. It seeks to enhance the voice of Web3 developers, bring these most active and interesting people closer to the audience, and provide them with the greatest support.
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