One factor that Telegram mini-games proved is that crypto adoption doesn’t essentially begin by pushing advanced applied sciences and burdensome onboarding processes that significantly hinder consumer expertise.
With just some mechanics and clear in-game economies and rewards, Telegram-based crypto video games made headlines all through 2024, making a fuss on social media and contributing a big chunk of progress to Telegram’s consumer base.
All of that is due to The Open Community (TON), one of many largest blockchain ecosystems within the DeFi house. However is it simply mini-games? No, it’s a posh system with subtle mechanisms tailor-made to builders’ calls for. From liquid staking protocols to constructing a DAO or a Area Title Service (DNS), TON has turn out to be a Web3 powerhouse.
Within the following information, you’ll study not solely the way it works but in addition all the important thing parts that maintain the ecosystem and make it distinctive within the crypto house. You’ll additionally find out about the most well-liked DeFi tasks and its flagship coin, Toncoin.
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What Is The Open Community (TON)?
The Open Community (TON) is a blockchain platform designed for seamless integration with different blockchain methods, aiming to make exchanging digital belongings, reminiscent of cryptocurrencies and non-fungible tokens (NFTs), as simple as on a regular basis messaging.
Initially developed by Telegram, the messaging app developed and led by brothers Pavel and Nikolai Durov, TON has developed right into a next-generation blockchain targeted on pace, scalability, and consumer accessibility.
Fast Historical past Recap
TON’s origins hint again to Telegram’s imaginative and prescient of making a blockchain that would help its huge neighborhood and improve the app’s ecosystem with a platform able to dealing with safe and speedy transactions.
Whereas it was a sound challenge initially, regulatory obstacles didn’t take lengthy to kick in. TON was initially known as Telegram Open Community and raised over $1.7 billion by way of a non-public token sale in 2018. Nonetheless, a 12 months later, the US Securities and Alternate Fee (SEC) filed a lawsuit in opposition to Telegram, alleging that the token providing was an unregistered securities sale.
This brought on Telegram’s withdrawal from the challenge, handing out the event of the blockchain to the neighborhood, which renamed it The Open Community. And whereas TON operates independently from Telegram, it maintains ties with the messaging app. Plenty of the crypto mini-games constructed on TON are deployed on Telegram, seeing huge success for tokens like Notcoin (NOT) and Catizen, two fashionable tap-to-earn video games that massively boosted Telegram’s consumer base, which is almost one billion customers worldwide.
How Does TON Work?
TON’s structure is nothing wanting easy. It’s constructed to be extremely scalable, quick, and interoperable, utilizing a complicated mixture of a masterchain-workchain construction, dynamic sharding, and a consensus mechanism with Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) properties.
Total, TON is a robust platform for dApps and decentralized providers. Let’s study it.
Masterchain and Workchains
That is the place issues get sophisticated, however let’s dive deep into it.
TON employs a multi-layered construction consisting of a number of chains that may talk with one another. All chains on TON are known as a workchain, and there are solely two operational workchains: The Masterchain and the Basechain.
The Basechain is the place transactions between actors are settled day-after-day. The Masterchain is mainly the community’s central ledger that shops block headers of all accompanying Workchains. In different phrases, the Masterchain maintains the community’s general state and managing essential features reminiscent of protocol modifications and validator elections.
However, Workchains are particular person blockchains inside the TON community. Every Workchain operates independently and may deal with particular purposes or use circumstances, offering flexibility and specialization inside the community.
Furthermore, TON can help 2^32 (roughly 4.3 billion) workchains, however once more, there are solely two operation ones. You could possibly theoretically construct a workchain, but it surely’s fairly sophisticated and costly—and also you’d want ⅔ of votes from validators to approve it.
Sharding Know-how
To reinforce scalability, TON makes use of superior sharding methods. Dynamic sharding permits TON to mechanically break up and merge shardchains primarily based on transaction quantity. This ensures that efficiency stays optimum and prevents any potential bottlenecks.
TON additionally leverages horizontal scalability, which implies that by including extra shards, the community can deal with elevated transaction volumes with out compromising general efficiency. It’s primarily an adaptable system that may stay sustainable whilst demand grows.
TON’s Proof-of-Stake Consensus
As talked about, TON leverages the Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism that comes with Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) properties, which implies the community can obtain consensus even when some malicious actors are current, making certain uptime, reliability, and safety. Let’s increase a bit extra on this and clarify it merely:
- Most trustworthy nodes on TON can proceed to course of transactions and keep the community’s integrity even when some nodes are compromised or performing maliciously.
- There’s additionally slashing, which cuts malicious actors’ staked tokens in half, so it’s fairly a robust financial disincentive.
- To wrap it up, trustworthy nodes can agree on the state of the community even when different not-so-honest nodes are conflicting data.
Validator nodes play an important position on this course of by staking TON cash to take part within the consensus mechanism, successfully vouching for his or her reliability and trustworthiness. This course of ensures that solely credible members contribute to sustaining the community’s integrity.
Key Options
TON is designed to be each scalable and quick, able to processing hundreds of transactions per second. The community achieves a finality time of simply 5 seconds, making it one of many quickest blockchains in operation.
Moreover, TON emphasizes cross-chain compatibility, which permits for seamless interplay with different blockchain networks. This interoperability makes it straightforward for various networks to speak and change knowledge, enhancing the general utility of the TON ecosystem.
Immediate Hypercube Routing
Hypercube is one other revolutionary function of TON that ensures environment friendly knowledge change between any two blockchains within the community, no matter their measurement. The time taken to switch knowledge has a logarithmic relationship with the variety of blockchains, permitting TON to scale to tens of millions of chains with out compromising processing pace.
TON Digital Machine
The TON community additionally affords strong sensible contract capabilities due to the TON Digital Machine (TVM), designed to execute sensible contracts effectively and make it appropriate for a variety of dApps.
For the builders studying this, TON helps a number of programming languages, together with fashionable choices like Fift and Solidity, for sensible contract growth, offering you with the pliability to decide on the language that most closely fits your wants.
TON Community Governance
The TON Basis performs a major position in driving the community’s progress by way of initiatives reminiscent of ecosystem incentives and developer grants. These efforts make sure that the community continues to develop, appeal to expertise, and stay revolutionary.
Nonetheless, TON’s governance system works barely otherwise than a typical decentralized autonomous group (DAO). That is the place TON.Vote kicks in—a decentralized on-chain governance platform tailor-made to the TON ecosystem.
Not like platforms like Snapshot.org, TON.Vote conducts all voting instantly on-chain, which considerably enhances transparency and safety. The platform includes a decentralized and trustless voting mechanism the place every proposal triggers the deployment of a sensible contract. All votes are securely saved on IPFS, making them independently verifiable.
TON.Vote helps voting choices reminiscent of “sure,” “no,” and “abstain,” so it’s fairly an easy decision-making course of for the neighborhood.
In the end, updates or modifications to the TON blockchain require approval from no less than 66% of the validators. This excessive approval threshold ensures that modifications to the community obtain substantial help from the neighborhood.
Whereas TON.Vote isn’t precisely a DAO; it helps the creation and administration of a number of DAOs throughout its ecosystem.
Total, the concept is to offer a construction that allows higher…
