Overview
TON is a Layer-1 Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchain that comprises various components such as TON Blockchain, TON Virtual Machine, TON Payment, TON DNS, TON Storage, and TON Sites. The network uses a Byzantine Fault Tolerance protocol named “Catchain Consensus” to achieve network consensus, block generation, and transaction validation. Catchain is tailored for TON’s blockchain architecture, particularly its sharding structure. TON is designed as a “masterchain” with multiple “workchains” (up to 2^32). These work chains are further classified into “shard chains” based on the transaction load and account numbers. This structure aims to distribute workload and interaction between accounts via dynamically splitting busy shard chains into smaller ones or merging underused shard chains.
History
In 2018, Telegram Messenger’s co-founders, Pavel Durov and Nikolai Durov, launched the Telegram Open Network (TON) project to support the company’s servers and related services. To finance the development, Telegram raised $1.7 billion from the sale of TON’s native token, GRAM, in February 2018. The TON virtual machine (TVM) was released in December 2018, followed by two testnets in 2019. However, in October 2019, the SEC filed a complaint against Telegram Group Inc. As part of the 2020 settlement, Telegram was required to pay back 70% ($1.2 billion) of the funds raised to its investors, in addition to an $18.5 million penalty. Telegram discontinued the project and open-sourced its codebase on GitHub.
After Telegram halted TON’s development, other groups were able to continue the project thanks to the published whitepaper and open-sourced code. This led to the formation of three separate TON-inspired projects – Free TON, New TON, and TON Community Blockchain. Currently, Free TON and New TON are the most notable of the three, with both vying for the original TON blockchain’s brand identity. In December 2021, Free TON rebranded to Everscale, while New TON obtained the rights to the original TON blockchain’s GitHub codebase from Telegram.
In May 2020, Anatoliy Makosov and EmelyanenkoK formed New TON, which has since expanded to a team of 40+ developers known as the TON Foundation. The community renamed the original TON testnet v2, released by Telegram in 2019, as The Open Network (TON) Mainnet in May 2021. Since then, the TON Foundation has been independently maintaining and improving the original TON codebase as a decentralized blockchain project, with the ultimate aim of creating a fully decentralized internet.
In September 2023, the TON Foundation was launched as a Swiss non-profit organization, adding an extra layer of credibility and accountability. Additionally, the foundation announced that TON would be available on Telegram’s self-custodial wallet in the same month.
