TON: A Unique Blockchain Project and Its Development History

TON (The Open Network) has attracted widespread attention in the market as one of the most关注ed public chains in 2024, thanks to its high performance and close relationship with Telegram. Recently, on-chain metrics for TON have shown explosive growth, with daily active users increasing from 200,000 to 500,000, and the number of wallets surging to over 44 million.

In April 2024, TON integrated with Tether, minting over $700 million in liquidity, becoming the fifth largest blockchain by USDT issuance. Meanwhile, the price of $TON surged significantly, with its market cap reaching $23.7 billion at one point, placing it among the top ten cryptocurrencies by market capitalization.

However, an incident that occurred on August 25 triggered market turmoil. The CEO of Telegram was arrested by French police in Paris, accused of failing to effectively manage the platform. This news caused a significant drop in the price of $TON and the TON ecosystem's TVL in the short term.

After the incident, several well-known figures in the technology and media industries publicly expressed their support for the CEO. The official TON account released a message titled "Resistance" on social media and set the hand-drawn Resistance Dog (REDO) created by the CEO in 2018 as their profile picture, initiating a digital resistance movement.

Looking back at the development of TON, it has an inseparable connection with Telegram. Telegram was founded in 2013 and quickly grew into a leading global communication platform with its highly secure and private communication features, boasting nearly 900 million monthly active users.

In 2017, the Telegram team began developing the TON project and planned to launch the native cryptocurrency Gram. In 2018, they raised approximately $1.7 billion through an ICO, but subsequently faced regulatory challenges. In May 2020, Telegram announced its withdrawal from the TON project, and the development work was handed over to an independent open-source developer community.

In 2021, the TON Foundation took over the project, continuing the development of decentralization and scalability. In 2023, Telegram officially announced that the TON Blockchain would be its preferred Web3 infrastructure and integrated it into the application, making $TON the actual "platform token" for Telegram.

The core design concept of TON is to reconstruct traditional Blockchain protocols in a "bottom-up" manner, pursuing extreme performance and scalability. Its economic model, core technology, and ecosystem are all unique.

In terms of economic model, the initial total supply of $TON is 5 billion coins, mainly distributed through early PoW mining. It has now entered the PoS phase with an annual inflation rate of 0.6%. $TON serves not only as the network's gas token and staking token, but also has widespread applications on the Telegram platform, such as advertising payments and Premium service fees.

The core technology of TON is the infinite sharding paradigm, which greatly enhances the network's processing capacity and scalability. Its sharding architecture is divided into three layers: Masterchain, Workchain, and Shardchain, which can be dynamically adjusted to adapt to changes in load.

The TON ecosystem currently has over 500 Dapps covering multiple fields. However, its real advantage lies in the integration with Telegram's Web3, mainly achieved through Telegram Bot and Telegram Mini Apps (TMA). This combination provides users with a complete Web3 experience loop.

Overall, TON has gone through a process of being highly regarded, facing setbacks, and then being taken over and developed by the community. With the support of Telegram's large user base, along with advanced technology and a unique ecosystem, TON has demonstrated strong vitality and growth potential. Recent events have further highlighted TON's role as an inheritor of the spirit of digital resistance, showcasing its determination in the face of challenges.