An interview with a TonWhales co-founder

—Sergei, hi! We know very little about the history of TonWhales and your company. Could you tell us who founded the project?

—Hi! There are only two founders: My friend Stepan Korshakov and I.

—Stepan is the founder of YC; he was an ex-programmer at Telegram; and he’s won Vkontakte competitions. The latest project he worked on in the U.S. was creating a messenger app called Openland for the community, but he’s spending some time now in Russia, so he and I are working together on TonWhales.

—By the way, he’s one of the earliest Bitcoin GPU miners. He and a mutual friend of ours created a miner using video cards, but he soon had to sell his coins on school materials. Those coins today would be worth billions of dollars (we did the math).

—I’ve been an entrepreneur since the age of 18. I have some experience in mining.

—How did you choose TON, and where did the idea of TonWhales come from?

—It all started at the end of August when Stepan and I went boating with a friend of ours on a nice summer day. 

—He told us about this interesting coin called Toncoin, which he had mined with his computer’s processor. We were a bit surprised and asked him, ‘Why not with your video card?’ He said that mining Toncoin with a GPU was impossible. 

—Stepan immediately saw this as a challenge, and in three days, he literally wrote the code for GPU mining, after which we started mining. 

—Having mined a decent number of coins, we became interested in this cryptocurrency. Who’s behind it? What kind of developer team does it have? and so on. We found out that this project was no fluke and that TON already had a large community behind it (not only of technically gifted programmers). We decided to join the team and help out in any way possible.

—That’s when we wrote the Explorer, which would help us understand the network better.

—Your Explorer is a pretty big hit among the community. Can you tell us what its capabilities are and how it is different from TON’s native explorer?

—When we got coins, Stepan wrote his smart contract for the validator, and we started staking to understand how proof-of-stake works.

—After that, we took an Apple base Foundation DB, synchronized the blockchain, and created the Explorer. We built it exclusively for us to figure out how transactions work: How many wallets there are on the network, how many of them are active, who transfers funds to exchanges, etc. 

—The main difference from the native explorer, I guess, is that ours lets you see wallets as well as the oldest transactions. We think this is what got the users hooked.

—Also, we have a rating of the biggest wallets. We can analyze all the miners and validators. 

—But we still haven’t completed it, by the way. On the website, you can only see a search for transactions, but if you work with the base, then you’ll be able to see much more. This is only the beginning.

—What else have you been able to create at TonWhales?

—We wrote most of the libraries and tested all the wallet smart contracts. We’ve spent a lot of resources and time on ensuring that developments go smoothly, and we’re going to stick to this game plan moving forward.

—Just to list off some services:

—Explorer. Validator. A cold wallet. A staking pool for the validator, which we’re currently testing in a closed environment. A mining pool.

—Tell us more about the pool. Community members will be interested in this.

—We launched a mining pool where anyone can participate in Toncoin mining and expect not to have to wait for a few weeks while their mining equipment solves “Giver” proof-of-work algorithms.

—The pool divides the algorithm’s difficulty into smaller, more manageable parts, gathers all the participants’ solutions, and sends them to the Giver, which then hands out rewards to all participants.

—Only two people wrote it, and it took them about two weeks. Daniil was the one who made the most significant investment in the pool (hence the pool’s name, Daniil Miner). After that, we brought him onboard our core team. We created a pool for ourselves, which is why we handled it so quickly. This was a situation where the developers were the product's first users. Naturally, we’re mining, using our pool, but our wallet can be found easily — it’s one of the best performers, for now.

—By the way, anyone can join our pool. All the information you need is in the section How to join.

—We believe in TON. We continue to mine, and our pool is responsible for about 75% of the network’s total hash rate at the moment. (at the moment of the interview.)

—You disperse the pool’s rewards in an unusual way. Tell us more about this process.

—The pool’s commission is 10%, 25% of which is sent directly to the TON Foundation because we want this nascent network to continue developing. 

—50% goes to our development fund of commercial projects on TON.

—Tell us about your fund.

—We want to make commercial applications native to the blockchain. For example, some big players who have written smart contracts to mint NFTs on TON have approached us. 

—They’re even ready to leave their companies and reject offers from large American companies to join us. Our fund was founded specifically for these kinds of initiatives.

—First of all, we’re entrepreneurs, but we also have non-commercial projects planned to help the network overcome some hurdles at the beginning of this startup growth.

—For example, those same NFTs: We want to write open-source smart contracts to mint NFTs on TON.

—We have a prototype in the testnet, and you can even see it in action.

—We came up with a design so that when someone wants to create one, marketplaces such as OpenSea won’t be needed. Any user will be able to establish the rules of how their token will be sold without a third party.

—We have more cool ideas, but we’re not ready to announce anything yet.

—A philosophical question for you: How do you see the development of TON’s ecosystem and your place in it?

—The way I see it, TON is not a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin. It’s more like an ecosystem for decentralized applications like Ethereum. 

—Decentralized networks are growing at a similar pace as the internet did. 

—Of course, there’s Ethereum, but one player can’t have a 100% market share. Because of this, there will be blockchains that’ll enter the market and take some of that market share by showing their strong qualities.

—And those who think that TON is just some run-of-the-mill mining operation on the market, who are selling their coins at a low price, are making a mistake, in my opinion. This is a proof-of-stake network. They’re tentatively selling miners without waiting for the mining itself. We at TonWhales see TON as a product with a lot of potential and can become an ecosystem for DApps.

—What about us? As I’ve already mentioned, we’re entrepreneurs. We can create commercial products for TON, and the non-commercial ones will appear on their own. 

—So, our entrepreneurial motivation makes us get up early in the morning and start the day at a high tempo. Maybe one day, it’ll change to something a bit more altruistic, but as long as it’s motivating us, it’s not worth fixing something that ain’t broke.

—One final question: What new services can we expect in the short term?

1. A staking pool for proof-of-stake mining from the validators with a 12% APY.
2. A service to mint your own NFTs on the TON blockchain.

—This is what you can expect soon.

—Sergei, thank you so much for your time and the interview! All the best to you and your projects at TonWhales.