Decentralization on the TON

Deep TON

In fact, decentralization is the basic deployment principle for TON and any other blockchain. Without it, Web3.0 cannot be implemented. Accordingly, all elements of the TON ecosystem must be decentralized as much as possible. This process is very complex and continues throughout the years of blockchain's operation.

The advantages of decentralization

The benefits are many, and many more so than any centralized platform can offer. Decentralized networks are more secure, resilient and better protected against external attacks and collusion. In addition, such networks are not subject to censorship and transfer control over data to the owners themselves.

Types of Decentralization

Each type of decentralization is independent of the other and at the same time forms a whole with it.

Architectural decentralization builds the infrastructure so that there is no central point of failure. When one speaks of this type of decentralization, one usually refers to the number and distribution of validators and the number of nodes that can fail at a moment's notice without much damage to the network.
Decentralized management answers questions about how many participants and how they control the issuance and performance of the ecosystem. Again, the interesting detail is that governance is decentralized, but for the sake of blockchain progress, it behaves as a single entity.
Decentralized development in a general sense means that development teams code as independent units. They create interfaces, data structures and software. However, autonomy does not prevent them from interacting with each other to improve the network itself.

In fact, decentralization is an example of how the heuristic principle works - if you split up a system, its parts will still interact with each other.

Now for how decentralization works on the TON blockchain

Architectural decentralization of TON

When decentralizing, any TON participant can run a node with a copy of the blockchain (full node) and become a validator. There are certain conditions, which he has to fulfill - for example, to allocate for validation at least 300,000 coins (his own and nominators'). Better yet, run two pools for full node, but then you need to invest 600,000 coins.

TON currently supports 234 validators. Eventually this number will grow to 1,000! However, the number of validators is not the basis by which the level of decentralization is determined. Much more important is how the nodes are distributed. For example, validators cannot be placed in the same data centers and in geographical proximity to each other.

And here's why:

The transfer rate per transaction on a TON is 4 or 5 seconds. And the throughput is millions of TPS (transactions per second). But the farther the data center is from the user, the slower the transactions are. For example, a user sends a transaction in the Netherlands and the data center is in Singapore. Obviously, the transmission speed will be lower than when the same node interacts with the server in the Netherlands.
Even the best data center can stop working unexpectedly. If a large number of machines have been hosted on it, the blockchain will go down when they shut down. The critical cluster of nodes is 33%.

So far, the TON network is not very busy and there is no particular need to increase the number of validators. But the problem of node distribution remains. Quite a few "rollers" sit in Hetzner (Germany) and OVH (France). Less than a third in each data center, but that's a lot. So, according to one of the core developers of TON, when the data center of the hosting provider OVH burned down in March this year, the blockchain TON although not fell down, but still "felt" all the "joys" of the failure of nodes.

After that case, TF recommended to validators to distribute nodes from those data centers. To what extent the recommendation was implemented is unknown. So far there is no algorithm which cuts off the offending node from the network, which means that the problem has not been solved.

Governance - TON decentralization marker

Decentralized governance of the TON blockchain can be simplified as follows:

The TON Foundation (TF), whose members are the core developers of the network, validators, the Foundation and grant program, management teams for various blockchain development areas, etc.

And the TON community, which includes validators, product and service developers for the blockchain ecosystem, foundations and investment groups, various project teams (including NFT, DeFi, DEX), information and topic channels and chat rooms... and, finally, community members who are not engaged in any way.

important clarification:

TF is a distributed structure that is capable of acting as a unified team, with the goal of building a TON blockchain in mind. (This feature of decentralized systems has already been noted above.)
TF's activities are subordinate to the deployment of Nikolai Durov's White Paper plan.
TF's tasks include building TON infrastructure and providing community members with a base for their own plans and projects.

In turn, the community develops the TON ecosystem using tools and features from TF.

In fact, we are talking about a prototype of DAO, although it is possible that blockchain will find its own unique system of self-management.

Validators also take an important part in the governance of TON. Based on PoS -consensus, they make decisions about all network configuration changes. For an unbiased decision, it is important that none of the validator groups have too much weight in voting. And there is a problem here.

There are three such groups on the blockchain. The first is a grouping of TF validators with 10% of the weight of the network. However, this group cannot be seen as a whale-type faction that makes decisions without regard to the opinions of its nominators. In contrast, TF validators are a simple sum of the participants. They each have their own position and voice. The second group are TON Whales with ~8% network weight (but you have to clarify at a specific point). Staking also revealed another faction weighing in at 10% of the net. The rest are much smaller...

Decentralization of development.

TON aims for decentralization in everything, and in development too.

Developers are distributed according to development goals. So, key engineers build the blockchain and create the tools for TON ecosystem members. And ecosystem coding teams implement projects and launch their new products and services.
The code base for TON is mostly represented as Open Source and is available to all developers. At the same time, commercial projects are free to use their proprietary code.
Teams of engineers are distributed geographically, i.e. it is an international community.
Anyone on the network can run the validator without anyone's permission.
There is also no restriction on the right to acquire, transfer, and steal TON coins.
No one is able to prohibit blockchain participants from creating and deploying decentralized applications in the form of smart contracts, etc.

As one blockchain developer correctly noted:

"TON is a decentralized ecosystem. The developers of the TON Network have gone to great lengths to make all the core services of the TON infrastructure fully decentralized.