Today we're delving into a blockchain project that's been making waves,The Open Network You might already be familiar with Telegram Messenger, but did you know they have their very own layer1 blockchain?
Let’s kick things off with a bit of history It all began when the Telegram Messenger,team set out to find blockchain solutions that they could easily integrate into the messaging platform and support their user base. When they couldn't find one that fit the bill, they decided to create their own.The team, led by brothers Nikolai and Pavel Durov,first unveiled the Telegram Open Network,TON, and its cryptocurrency, ‘Gram’, back in 2018. Its launch gained a lot of attention and raised a very impressive $1.7 billion in a token sale, making it one of the most successful cryptocurrency ICOs in history.
With all this support and funding, the Telegram team got to work on building this new Layer 1 blockchain, but just as TON was on the brink of completion, the US Securities and Exchange Commission aka SEC stepped in with legal action, accusing Telegram of an unregistered securities offering. A legal battle ensued,but in 2020, Pavel Durov announced Telegram's exit from the project.
After a hefty $18.5 million settlement with the SEC, the team issued refunds to investors and stopped development of TON and support of its testnet, often referred to as “testnet2”.At that time, TON’s code was open source and widely accessible on GitHub which meant that anyone could contribute. Deciding that the project just had too much potential to waste.
A small team of developers led by Anatoliy Makosov, a software developer,and Kirill Emelyanenko, a programmer with a Ph.D. in Physics and Mathematics, decided to step in and continue TON’s development.Both developers are still part of the TON Foundation team and handle core development.
While the current network is completely independent from Telegram, in 2021 Pavel Durov expressed his happiness that the project would continue and wished the new team success. Fast forward to 2021, and the Telegram Open Network got a small makeover. The original testnet2 by the Telegram team became Mainnet, the new TON team was rebranded to TON Foundation, and the whole project was renamed to The Open Network - an effort to keep its name as TON. Now, let’s dive into how this blockchain works.
The Open Network uses a combination of a proof-of-stake aka POS consensus mechanism, sharding, and a virtual machine to ensure that it is fast, flexible, and cost-effective. Because of this, TON claims it can support millions of users and process millions of transactions per second.Sharding, a newer approach to scalability, splits the network into interconnected pieces that still run independently, allowing multiple transactions to run in parallel. TON also implements dynamic sharding, which means the network is able to split or merge these pieces depending on the network’s load.
let’s not forget TON’s virtual machine, which is bringing some new concepts to the table. Take for example, that TON’s fee model charges the contract developer instead of users to fund operations. Each mart contract holds a TON token balance, which it uses to pay for its own resource costs. Another example is the asynchronous architecture that the TON network uses to process multiple transactions independently from each other.
So what is TON doing differently that sets it apart from other L1 blockchain solutions?
At the top of the list is the network’s ability to connect with Telegram’s large user base. In 2022, the application had over 700 million monthly active users and projects to have over 1 billion by the end of 2023.Since day one, seamlessly bridging blockchain technologies and distributed services to the everyday user was part of the whitepaper.
One key step in this is the integration of the self custodial TON based crypto wallet to the platform, where users can now send, receive, buy, and swap Toncoin directly within Telegram. TON's ecosystem also boasts a lineup of game changers, including TON Storage for decentralized file storage, TON Proxy to safeguard your IP, and TON DNS to rename your TON wallet address to human-readable names.
But it doesn’t end there. You can also use TON Payments for seamless transactions, and TON Bridge to connect with different blockchain networks.Telegram’s ambitious plans seem to mimic WeChat’s, and many have taken notice. After all, WeChat, with well over 1 billion monthly active users, earned the title of the first super-app when it
seamlessly integrated instant messaging with a digital wallet, and then further expanded their list of available services to include games, live streams, e-commerce, and more. If that’s the case then TON and Telegram have quite the journey ahead of them.
Now let’s talk about Toncoin, or TTON which is the native and utility token of TON. It’s used for transaction fees, staking, and gas payments. TON is also a DAO, meaning users who hold TTON can vote on any proposals.
The price of Toncoin is $2.4 today with a 24hour trading volume of 12 million dollar. This represents a 1.3% price increase in the last 24 hours and a 8% price increase in the past 30 days. With a circulating supply of 3.5 Billion TON, Toncoin is valued at a market cap of 8.3 billion dollar. still 54% down since ATH but it easily can hit 4-5$ in 2024
buckle up, we got an insane year a head of us
Note
The TON20 inscription similar to BRC20 caused the TON blockchain to generate more than 2 million transactions in half an hour, and the network usage increased by 61x. The TON network was severely congested and verification was delayed. Major wallets have temporarily suspended the service.
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