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TON Chain: Fork of the Original Telegram TON Project
Sandra Leow
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Key Takeaways
12 min read
  • TON is a fork of the original Telegram’s TON project that was eventually shelved in 2020 after facing regulatory hurdles. TON is now an independent project.
  • TON scales its network by taking sharding to the extreme. Both the MasterChain and Workchain can theoretically be split into 2^(32) WorkChains and 2^(60) ShardChains respectively.
  • Currently, TON’s theoretical maximum of 1 million transactions per second has not been achieved in practice.
  • TON's high hardware validator requirements are comparable with high bandwidth incumbents like Solana and Aptos. However users have to stake 600,000 ($1.32m) worth of TON tokens to be a validator.
  • In June 2020, almost all of the TON tokens (98.55% of the total supply) were made available for mining. The network has now switched to a Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism. TON tokenomics is inflationary by design.
  • Both FTX withdrawer and Dragonfly Capital currently hold ~62% of all WTON on Ethereum of which none have been sold on the market.
  • Bridging activity from Ethereum and BNB Chain has been lackluster with no sustainable form of adoption.
  • While there is evidence of developers building on TON, most applications fail to drive any meaningful user engagement.
  • While TON is an independent project, Telegram has publicly shown its support for the blockchain. This association could potentially be an important catalyst down the road, if regulators permit.

What is TON (Previously known as Newton)?

TON (The Open Network), is another new L1 on the market that was originally developed by the Russian social media company Telegram. This new L1 chain is a fork of the original Telegram’s TON project that was eventually shelved in 2020 after facing regulatory hurdles.

TON was designed to be a  blockchain of blockchains aimed at helping the network in scaling and connecting multiple chains together. This idea is somewhat similar to Cosmos’s IBC system. The network claims that it is capable of achieving up to 1m TPS.

Achieving 1m TPS

TON takes the...