Interview with Anatoliy Makosov, Part 2
The Open NetworkPart 1: Trans. Interview Part 1
Questions and answers
1. How many new validators went online after EXMO had listed Toncoin?
2. How many validators were there before the EXMO listing?
3. How much Toncoin is needed to become a validator? As far as I understand, it’s 600,000 tokens or $2.5 million at current prices. For a project ranked 2,800th on CoinMarketCap, that’s a highly restricting financial barrier for people who want to become new validators.
Answers to questions 1, 2, and 3:
One principle behind proof-of-stake blockchains is that a blockchain’s decentralization and functionality comes not at the expense of a large number of nodes but at the large number of validators, which guarantee to operate honestly with their stake. (Anyone can become a validator by staking a significant number of coins.)
If a validator or a group of validators start behaving in their self-interests — giving someone coins out of thin air — they will be temporarily disabled from validation, and their stake will be either partially or entirely slashed automatically. This mechanism is baked into the blockchain.
The size of the stake must be big. If it’s small, validators won’t be afraid of losing it — they’ll run software on cheap and slow equipment or even attempt to “cheat.”
Pretty soon, it won’t be necessary to own the same number of coins as the total sum of the stake to become a validator. We’ve announced the TON Nominators component and are working on it now. You’ll be able to chip in on the stake of someone’s hardware and split the validation rewards. You can read more details on this process in our Primer. And nominators don’t have access to the software or hardware of validators, which, in turn, increases the network’s decentralization.
The principles behind the work of validators and nominators were described in the original white paper. I’d like to point out that this is an established mechanism used by other blockchains.
I supposed that since Toncoin’s listing on EXMO, the number of validators has grown from around 110 to 148. Considering that the goal is 400 validators, everything’s going smoothly.
Regarding tokens, to participate in validation, 300,000 coins is required at the moment. 600,000 is required to participate continuously. This is a small amount. After the launch of TON Nominators, the size of the stake and the number of validators will increase. It would be ideal to involve about 10% of the total emission in the validation process.
About the rank on CoinMarketCap, we’re in the process of verifying information on CMC. It’s a pretty long process because TON is not a fork of Ethereum, and CMC requires a technical audit and additional instruments to conduct a technical analysis.
It’s worth remembering that we were listed on CMC just a few months ago. Once the verification of information and capitalization ends, TON will most likely jump to the top of the list.
It’s similar to how @tonblockchain got a verification checkmark after some time; we’ll get the same verification on other platforms and resources.
4. Who exactly from the Telegram team made the decision to relinquish the domain name?
We don’t know the person’s name. A user from the ton-blockchain GitHub account answered our open letter. And then the domain transfer happened. There’s no information about who made the decision.
5. How many native TON wallets were there before public trading launched?
In the spring of this year, there were already 76,000 wallets on the network with a positive balance. The first listing happened in the summer, and I think at that moment, there were around 78,000. The network has a rich history, and during the days of testnet2, there were even more users.
6. For you, what’s the economic incentive to continue developing the network if 99% of its tokens are controlled by people who are completely anonymous to you? These people could crash the token’s value to zero at any given moment.
The same as Bitcoin’s and Ethereum’s developers. On all decentralized blockchains, the developers hold a small percentage of the tokens, which is actually a healthy thing.
7. How do you plan on integrating with Telegram?
In other words, how do you plan on achieving mass adoption for your blockchain through Telegram’s 400 million users?
As it turns out, our histories are intertwined, and the core of our community was formed by people who love Telegram and its ecosystem and can work with it. That’s why the first TON products started appearing on Telegram.
But we think that TON is bigger than just a blockchain for a single audience, even if it has 400 million Telegram users. (By the way, I think they’ve already reached 500 million.)
A scalable blockchain with lightning-fast transactions and low fees, which TON offers, is a great place for any platform with a large audience.
So, that’s why we don’t have a strict connection with Telegram. But we plan on developing, for example, payments bots on Telegram.
This could look like bots and smart contracts that provide opportunities to make on-chain payments and non-custodial subscriptions to access paid channels.
9. What stage are you at in terms of the technology? What technological goals are in front of you? Is there a roadmap with concrete dates?
10. What’s the project’s main goal? Being just another awesome blockchain, or is there something more concrete and deeper planned for the blockchain?
Answers to questions 9 and 10:
We have a fully operational blockchain with quick transactions (about 4 seconds) and low fees (less than $0.02).
The network can already scale to accommodate high traffic volumes by creating shard chains.
We have a really simple interface for everyday users, not just for geeks. If you look at standard TON apps and services, you’ll notice that they contain almost no technical information. Instead of transaction hashes, you’ll see animated stickers.
This already puts TON among the top modern blockchains.
But we still have huge yet unrealized potential. You have to understand that in the beginning, the technology was created by a team of geniuses at Telegram headed by Nikolai Durov. Although a few years have gone by, their ideas still remain relevant.
For example, Ethereum Name Service (ENS) is trending on the network; on TON, there’s TON DNS technology.
Filecoin is also trending. But TON has its built-in TON Storage service, which is way more functional.
Interoperability is also trending. TON is designed to be a blockchain out of other blockchains, which allows it to scale under heavy traffic volumes and onboard other blockchains.
Our main mission is to complete every TON component and become a pipeline between the internet and other blockchains, effectively creating a new, unified, global network.
We’re working on TON DNS, TON Sites, TON Proxy, and TON Storage, all of which haven’t lost any relevance. Instead, they’re starting to trend. The foresight of the “founding fathers” is simply amazing.
—
You can find more detailed information at https://ton.org/whitepaper.pdf.
You can read our roadmap at https://ton.org/primer.pdf.
11. How are the coins distributed, and doesn’t this threaten decentralization?
If to exclude the Elector (a system contract that belongs to no one), the address holding the most Toncoin has 112.4 million tokens, which is around 2.6% of the supply. It should be noted that this address is dormant. That means it hasn’t made any outgoing transactions.
In general, of the top 100 wealthiest addresses (“whales”), with the exception of the Elector contract, each has an average of 0.54%–2.6% of the total supply, or 0.97% as a median. The total amount of Toncoin among all of these wallets is about 41.8 million.
Toncoin’s initial token distribution via mining was more decentralized than the distribution of most networks that launched after 2016.
12. If you’re going to integrate into Telegram as a payments service, what interactions will be high-risk? There has been a lot of traffic connected to narcotics and other illicit activity.
I can’t agree with your statement about narcotics trafficking. It appears as though Telegram has a moderation service dedicated to weeding out these kinds of bots.
This question of moderation will be handled by those who will create apps and bots. We (the TON Foundation) are developing a platform that has foundational standards and protocols.
Naturally, we’re against anything illegal.
8. Why is the team anonymous?
13. Does the project have an official face? Founders? Besides you and the other developer, there’s no information about anyone else.
Answers to both questions below:
The backbone of the community is the developers.
You can find a list of the most active contributors to the project on our GitHub: https://github.com/orgs/newton-blockchain/people
But as we’re essentially technical specialists, we’re not really fans of public communication. We’re not really capable and don’t like doing it. On top of that, we don’t see the point.
Although, a developer from Tonkeeper was part of an AMA in a chat with OKX and broke every record.
14. The @Wallet Telegram bot can’t be called @Wallet.
It has to be Walletbot, with “bot” at the end.
Creating a bot without the “bot” suffix is only permitted for Telegram services — only Telegram can permit storing Toncoin and Bitcoin in this wallet.
Why does this rule not apply to you when it does for all other Telegram bots?
@wallet is a separate project from guys in the community, and it would probably be better to ask them.
15. How did Gordeev and the Decenter Telegram channel start promoting your project? In 2017, Decenter promoted Ilya Perekopskii’s project, Blackmoon. Decenter has relevant posts (I can show you screenshots). The Decenter Telegram channel has posts proving this information. This tells us that Gordeev could have some kind of close relationship with the team at Telegram.
I don’t know Gordeev. He’s never participated in TON’s development, but, as we can see, he’s a big fan of our technology.
16. Will there be a scanner (explorer) for the TON blockchain so you can have transparent information on holders?
It’s a common question we get: Where’s the fully functional Ton explorer? We’re working hard on developing a blockchain for regular users and believe that regular users won’t need an explorer.
When you transfer money to a friend from the Sberbank app, you don’t go to use the Sber explorer afterward.
Blockchain explorers were invented for slow networks where you have to wait three hours for a transaction to go through. On TON, transactions are almost instantaneous.
Obviously, we’re going to develop an explorer for the devs, and we’ve been working on this. Users are our first priority; therefore, developer tools will come later.
17. A cheeky question from a friend (Aleksei Antonov, who’s going to publish the answer on his channel of more than 20,000 crypto users):
“Why do you always lie?”
https://twitter.com/sonmsupremacy/status/1172685492825010176
18. Are you not trying to save yourselves from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, which might think that Toncoin is another iteration of the banned Gram token? This would put Telegram in a really bad spot — especially in light of preferential treatment from Telegram, such as your bot’s name and the verification checkmark on your channel.
Concerning the checkmark, most crypto projects have it. For example:
About the SEC, as far as I know, there have been no restrictions imposed on TON’s technology or its code. Gram’s launch was banned because, according to the SEC, it held an illegal ICO.
Gram was never released. According to a mutual settlement, which included the investors, Telegram reimbursed the investors.
In its current state, TON has no investors, and no one sold tokens in a centralized way, in the beginning, to attract investments to the project. The initial Toncoin token distribution is facilitated via mining, which is available to everyone.
Every exchange (except decentralized exchanges) that we know of does not allow Americans to buy Toncoin.
19. Why Toncoin? What was your financial motivation?
Who exactly started paying you (in bonuses or other forms of remunerations) once your joined TON?
We have no salaries. The main thing is our motivation: to take part in developing something global. Although, due to your field of work, you probably don’t believe this. But we’re genuinely interested in working on this technology and seeing how it grows.
For expenses toward the server and other things, we have donations from the TON Foundation.
20. What are you going to do about the network’s biggest issue of 4.9 billion tokens being in the hands of anonymous miners? You compare Toncoin to Bitcoin, but back in 2011, Bitcoin wasn’t mined on that same scale proportional to the network.
On the Bitcoin network, all Bitcoin is currently in the hands of anonymous miners. Bitcoin also has “whales.” They, too, have the power to crash its price with the exact same probability.
The token issuance of other projects is controlled by governance voting. A couple of easy examples are Ripple and BNB Chain.
All blockchain projects try to solve this problem by distributing tokens evenly.
We have some decentralized components planned for the network — TON Nominators and TON Reserve. They’re designed so that “whales” are incentivized to deposit as many tokens as they can where the more “frozen” tokens there are, the more stable the network and tokenomics become.
21. Don’t you have any concerns about how the media are looking into your tokenomics and how almost the entire Toncoin supply is in people’s hands, and they start writing about this? And what happens when mainstream English media catch wind of this, which could lead to attracting interest from the SEC?
TON has a decentralized token distribution, which resembles the chaotic distribution of Bitcoin in its network’s early stages. It’s not ideal, but there’s nothing alarming with it either.
We’re not hiding anything. All information about the tokens, the mining, and balances are openly available on the blockchain, and anyone can look at and analyze this information.
Also, we didn’t have an ICO, and we have no plans on breaking the law or moral norms. Why would the SEC be interested in us?
The media will do what they believe is right.
22. My colleagues attentively went through your GitHub.
You’re using Telegram’s regular TON code — with some tweaks here and there — but they’re absolutely not fundamental. There’s even an integration of the fork with Telegram’s web client.
That is, you’ve integrated it into one of Telegram’s official clients.
TON is a fine project, but it’s already aged a lot and isn’t developing.
From what can we hypothetically say that Toncoin is a scam because the development of its base technology isn’t happening — there’s just integration with Telegram’s web client. To show monkeys what’s happening? There are only two commits, but what’s interesting is that they constantly mix on the top layer. I suspect that an update with upstream is built into the repository so that these commits are always on top — as in, “look at how alive our repository is.”
So, we’ve now touched on the second-biggest problem. It’s that now you not only have an almost completely poached testnet but really old code that is always playing catch-up with the industry’s leaders, such as Ethereum, Polkadot, and Near. What are you going to do about this?
Our open-source community already has quite a lot of developers and, moreover, repositories. I’ll give you a small list:
https://github.com/newton-blockchain — Core GitHub, where the open-source community started working on core components.
https://github.com/ton-blockchain — The original TON GitHub of Telegram’s team, which was transferred to the community in an answer to an open letter. The project is in the process of migrating to this GitHub. So, part of the repositories has already been moved.
https://github.com/igroman787/mytonctrl — Software for validators.
https://github.com/toncenter — Web wallets and the corresponding software.
https://github.com/tontechio/ — Software for miners.
And many others.
Open-source projects almost always comprise more than a single repository, which speaks for itself. This is the work of a lot of people where every single person does something fascinating for the project.
The NewTON blockchain contains the operational version of TON’s node. When we encounter a potential bug, vulnerability, or the opportunity to add something, we do it — which can be seen in the history of the commits.
What did your colleagues want to see in code from launched and operational node software? The node’s code is really stable and safe; we don’t need to fix errors and bugs every single day or rewrite the code from scratch.
The development of new apps and components for the network is ongoing in separate branches, which are often private. This is also a totally regular practice. Usually, a tested and safe product, more or less, is launched in public.
Concerning our “TON Magic,” we’re working on Google Chrome extensions that will add the capacity to send Toncoin in the web version of Telegram. Developers from our community were able to do this by studying Telegram’s open-source code and writing a small piece of TON code. The extension will act as an “injection” of this code into Telegram.
I’d like to emphasize that only the most talented developers are capable of doing such a thing.
Telegram’s web version often gets updated. Our auto-assembly system updates “TON Magic” for every new iteration of Telegram’s web version.
About the token distribution, I’ve answered above already. TON has decentralized distribution.
And about the aging code, the answer was given above as well. It’s absolutely false that TON’s code is old; it’s as up-to-date as it can be thanks to the original team’s foresight.
The current crypto landscape has just started to understand how to make fast and cheap blockchains. A lot of projects accomplish this by sacrificing decentralization, however. Interoperability, decentralized file storage on a blockchain, decentralized DNS and sites haven’t been done well yet.
23. By selling tokens for money, in essence, you’re giving away tokens to validators and nominators for minimal effort. (By the way, where’s the guarantee that these major tokenholders won’t be among the nominators who receive 60%?)
But if we toss out what’s in parentheses, what you’re doing is an airdrop at the same time as a token sale that costs money, effectively devaluing the token’s value.
What’s in parentheses has greater meaning. Because the major token holders can be like nominators by participating in the distribution of 60% of the profit and taking out a loan, they could also collect 40% in profits.
I don’t understand what’s written here. We’re not against answering your questions, but you’ll have to reword it.
Going by available information I’m privy to, generally, miners are selling tokens that are being mined right now. TON has more than 3,000 people in the mining chat, and they daily distribution from “Giver” smart contracts is about 180,000–200,000 Toncoin. *And this is soon coming to an end. Anyone can join the mining, but the hash rate is up to 50 TH/s.
About the text in parentheses, the share of revenue is sent to a smart contract and is guaranteed to have a fair distribution.
24. As it turned out, advertising on Telegram kicked off once the sale of your token started. Some mentioned that they didn’t see any other ads on Telegram, except for yours. If I understand this correctly, as a result, the opportunity to advertise on Telegram lay in your marketing.
Did you know beforehand, before the token sale, that you’d have the opportunity to advertise?
It’s flattering to hear that you think the TON community was able to work out a listing on two of the world’s biggest crypto exchanges and launch an advertising campaign on Telegram so that they’d almost overlap.
But the reality is that all of this was the product of months-long work from a lot of different people, which produced these results in a short timeframe thanks to random circumstances coinciding.
25. Does the projects have a legal registration? If so, in what country is it a legal entity? And is there a way to learn more about it?
Also, the domain name must have been given to a concrete person.
The TON Foundation is not a legal entity. We’re an open-source community, a non-commercial group of enthusiasts and developers of the project. At this moment, we don’t see any advantage in becoming legally registered, but with time, it’s totally possible if there are good reasons.
If to talk about the domain, it was given to me as an ambassador of the chosen community.
P.S.:
I see you enjoyed our funny usernames. We chose them for when we competed in programming contests, including Telegram hackathons. That’s where migrated from to TON. Many community participants are multi-time champions of these competitions for developers — they’re the best programmers in the world.