TON Connect 2.0

Tonkeeper team

On behalf of the community working on the standard, We are proud to announce TON Connect 2.0: a comprehensive communication protocol between wallets and apps in TON ecosystem. The Tonkeeper team lead the work on this standard as an independent open project with participation and feedback from the entire TON developer community.

TON Connect 2.0 is a major step forward for the entire ecosystem. It allows apps and wallets work seamlessly while maintaining crucial separation of concerns: apps provide the services based around TON smart contracts, while wallets control access to the users’ assets and cryptographic keys.

Why TON Connect?

"Secure, Decentralized, Great UX: choose two." — Ancient Chinese Trilemma.

What makes a great product is a well-designed user experience. That's why products that we love usually belong to the centralized ecosystems or even "walled gardens": operating systems, social networks, online shops and banking apps.

Truly decentralized apps traditionally have difficulty offering great UX. Anytime there is a separation of responsibility, there is extra friction, quirks and bugs. Users have full freedom in their journey, but they have to do all the work putting multiple pieces together.

Anyone who wishes to make great UX in a decentralized system has a risk of resolving this trilemma at the expense of security or decentralization. We see sometimes dapps that take on the role of the wallet in order to offer a streamlined UX, or we see products that are shift the ecosystem towards centralization (Git / Github).

With TON Connect we reach the Pareto frontier by making a lot of work for app developers. The protocol supports all possible use contexts, both for apps and wallets; it can be extended with new features without breaking existing uses; the app developer only has to throw in a couple of lines of code and get their app connected with all the TON wallets.

The end result is that the wallet becomes a natural extension of the app, and the app becomes an extension of the wallet.

TON Connect for users

For all the TON users TON Connect is truly an invisible feature: you put your money in the wallet, you go to the app, click ”Connect“, confirm in the wallet and you are in.

The app wants you to approve a transaction? One click — your wallet sends you a notification, you confirm, boom — done.

The wallet takes care of the security, authenticating the app and verifying the content of the transaction.

TON Connect for apps

With TON Connect, every wallet becomes a first-class authenticator device for your app. Anything user does on the blockchain has to be signed and approved by the user’s wallet.

TON Connect offers a way to request data from the wallets and sign transactions. In the future it will support more features that make integration even more seamless and helping the business of the services while keeping the customers in control.

Integrating TON Connect is very easy: install the SDK and follow the sample code and documentation. Apps do not need to even run a server to receive replies from the wallet: they can communicate right from the client-side (the frontend). All the TON wallets that support the protocol are available in the SDK automatically, and we are working on a UI kit that offers a consistent flow for users across all the dapps.

TON Connect for wallets

For wallet developers TON Connect is a protocol for making their wallets compatible with the entire ecosystem of dapps without having to support many custom signature schemes and smart contracts. Users expect that their wallet supports TON Connect and works consistently and securely with all the apps.

TON Connect has modular design so that every wallet may offer a unique capabilities (that may become part of the standard someday) and compete for the best UX in the TON universe.

If you make a wallet, add a pull-request to wallet registry

Apps that support TON Connect

TON Connect 2.0 is just getting started, and 8 projects already fully integrated TON Connect. More apps and wallets are going to adopt it in the coming weeks.

Next steps

We are working on a standard UI kit that gives app developers consistent TON UI for connecting and authentication. This will make adoption of TON Connect really easy and any developer would be able to do that in a day.

TON Connect is designed with future extensions in mind. There will be more data items for apps to request, such as contact details or KYC data (with full users’ approval, of course). More options for cryptographically signing custom messages for off-chain uses. And encryption protocol to let the wallet store the keys on behalf of the app, so that the app data is protected by the wallet and cannot be accessed even by the developers of the app itself.

We invite you to submit your ideas on additional features as issues on the documentation repository:

https://github.com/ton-connect/docs/issues