TON — next steps

To the developer community — in this article, we will identify what has been done to date in the TON project and set out goals for the future.

2021

As you know, the Telegram team designed the blockchain and the TON network, implemented the main portion of the project, but was forced to withdraw further from it under pressure from the SEC.

The project went on to be developed by the community — by the independent developers and enthusiasts. Active "resurrection" began in January 2021, and 10 months later, the blockchain was actually brought back to life by building the necessary infrastructure and creating basic tools, services and applications.

In November 2021, the network was ready to accept users — simultaneously, the Toncoin was listed on the world's largest exchanges, the number of network accounts exceeded 100 thousand, and more than 600 000 people began to follow the project. There has been exponential growth of interest in Toncoin mining and development on TON.

We were inspired by Pavel Durov's kind words, and were happy to continue working on TON in the original repository and on ton.org, which we received in response to our open letter.

Results of 2021

2022

Then the ecosystem building began — the vast majority of goods and services that exist only in the blockchain world were created and launched at TON this year.

Tokens, NFTs, staking, domain names, marketplaces, multifunctional wallets, launchpads, bridges, DEXs, first ICOs, IDOs, and much more have all been developed from scratch in a matter of months.

Such rapid development is due to the fact that TON attracts the most professional developers, entrepreneurs and creative people from all over the world.

The hallmark of the TON community is the desire to find new and innovative approaches to anything; few are willing to simply copy what has been done in other blockchains.

For this reason, many products on TON are unparalleled in the blockchain world: the ability to send cryptocurrency directly in the messenger with @wallet, @CryptoBot or other bots, decentralized subscriptions to channels and chats through @donate, TON NFT exhibitions at the Louvre, or an auction of premium usernames on the fragment.com platform.

Not only do products evolve quickly, but they also have world-class quality. For example, token support in Tonkeeper, staking in TonHub, TON sites in MyTonWallet and Juston — all this set new quality standards for cryptowallets. The same can be said about NFT marketplaces and NFT projects, blockchain explorers and other TON services.

11 months is a phenomenally short time to build such an ecosystem.

The global work was done to strengthen the stability of the network and tokenomics: TON Reserve of 500M TON has been collected this year, TON Nominators has been launched that allowed to increase the number of validators, an entire era — the initial distribution of coins, through mining — has been successfully completed. Updates to the blockchain core are released periodically.

New integrations and partnerships are being launched, and new Toncoin listings are held on a regular basis on the world's largest exchanges.

The ministries of three countries — Cameroon, Congo and the Democratic Republic of the Congo — stated that they are considering integrating TON at the state level.

New network components — scalable tokens, TON DNS, Payment Channels, TON Sites and TON Proxy 1.0 — were launched exactly as planned.

Much attention is paid to developers — tools, APIs, libraries, and documentation are created and improved. Grant and sponsorship programs, ecosystem funds are being established, various contests, AMAs, and hackathons are held regularly.

Thanks to this, the TON blockchain is coping with growth of the user base without force majeure and continues to consistently move forward in a challenging year for the crypto industry and the world.

Some figures, from the beginning of this year to November:

Number of network accounts: 128K → 1.4M

Number of media subscribers: 600K → 2M

Number of validators: 155 → 233

CoinMarketCup rank: 206 → 26

2023

If we aim for a really massive use of decentralised technology, blockchain alone will not suffice. One way or another we will have to create a full-fledged decentralized internet, The Open Network.

A stage between the naked blockchain and the new decentralized Internet exists that can be called the "decentralized App Store" — a blockchain-based ecosystem consisting of popular and useful applications and services that complement each other. Ideally, if products operate smoothly and quickly, meet the same standards and guidelines, speak plain language and are therefore convenient and understandable to users.

In fact, such an ecosystem has already been established in TON; all that is needed is to refine it, realize its potential, and fill it with life and audience.

As far as specific actions are concerned, it is logical for the development teams to focus on the quality and stability of their products and to follow the common network standards and guidelines.

It is literally necessary to forbid the use of technical terms and even the word "blockchain" itself in user interfaces, and rather to speak to the mass consumer in its language.

The TON Foundation team, in addition to maintaining the stability and security of the network with the continued growth of users, plans to launch all the system solutions the community needs, such as cross-chain bridges and stablecoins; necessary standards and guidelines, such as interaction protocols of wallets with applications, interface schemes of smart contracts and TON-services.

The top priority remains the developers themselves, so improvement to the tools, documentation, contest holdings, hackathons, and the balance of grant programs will continue.

TON is the only modern blockchain that finds new, sometimes unexpected means to attract users. Next year we will try to go beyond anything we have already done in that direction.

The work on the new network components — Payment Network, cross-chain solutions, TON Proxy and TON Storage updates — is a strategic direction and will also continue. But first and foremost, the existing TON ecosystem should be streamlined, making it as useful and user-friendly as possible for the average user.

A well-proven model of work is when each product is made by an independent developer or a standalone team. Interestingly, in this, the development community replicates the structure of the TON blockchain itself — sharding — where each validation team is engaged in some part of the blockchain, and the final result is a shared credit.

Let's move to a new scale!

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