TON Core: Overview of 2024

TON Core

Intro

In this report, we have compiled the major releases that the TON Core team has made or participated in during 2024.

50-fold increase in users

It is worth noting the peak loads: on September 27, 2024, 701K new wallets were added to the network and 18.1M transactions were executed in just one day.

9 TON kernel updates

The TON blockchain architecture was originally designed with a focus on scalability. However, in practice, there is always room for improvement and adjustment as the real workload grows.

During the year, the TON Core team released 9 major updates to the TON node. Some of the updates contained bug fixes, including fixes in network overlays and the block broadcasting system, which improved the stability and performance of the blockchain.

Other updates included major improvements and optimizations that reduce resource consumption. For example, TON 2024.06 dramatically reduced RAM consumption, and TON 2024.08 reduced blockchain state serialization time by a factor of 21 (from 18 hours to 50 minutes).

Incoming message queues have been significantly optimized, and outgoing message queues ("dispatch queues") have been added, so that now highly loaded contracts do not negatively impact the performance of the rest of the blockchain contracts.

TON Core's ongoing systematic work to improve the TON kernel, as well as its inherently scalable architecture, allows TON to withstand rapid user growth and peak loads.

Reduction of commissions by 2.5 times

TON has a unique feature - network commissions are fixed and do not depend on load. Thus, this year, despite a 50-fold growth, our commissions did not increase by a nanoton.

Moreover, in April last year we first tested the mechanism of reducing network commissions by network-wide voting. When the Toncoin exchange rate increased, the commissions were reduced by 2.5 times by voting. This will work in the future.

We have also created guidelines on how developers should act in the event of a general decrease in commissions and provided new opcodes in TVM that allow for dynamic calculation of network commissions.

New tools to optimize network commissions

We provided a number of new tools to enable developers to optimize the network commissions of their decentralized products:

A new technology "precompiled smart contracts" has been launched. The idea is that the code of the most semipolar contracts in the network can be written in C++ and embedded directly into the node. When launching such contracts, fewer actions are required, no TVM needs to be launched, and consequently network commissions are lower.
We have launched a new technology "Libraries for smart contracts" that allows you to bring shared data or smart contract code into shared libraries, thereby further reducing commission costs.
TVM and the FunC, Tolk languages still allow you to work at the lowest level and give you access down to bits and stack manipulations. This can be used by experienced developers to reduce gas consumption.

USDT Launch

USDt on TON was officially launched in April 2024. The announcement was made at TOKEN2049 by Pavel Durov, CEO and Founder of Telegram and Paolo Ardoino, CEO of Tether.

Since its launch, USDt-TON has become the fastest-growing asset in Tether's history. By September 2024, with backing from Tether, USDt-TON was supported by over 100 platforms globally, including centralized exchanges, payment systems, and infrastructure providers such as Binance, OKX, Copper and MoonPay.

In just eight months, USDt-TON surpassed $1.2 billion in net circulation, facilitated 26 million transactions across 3.5 million wallets, and achieved a total transaction volume of $39.6 billion.

The TON Core team prepared the technical part of this launch, with a special focus on security and reducing network fees:

This is a completely redesigned and improved smart contract for regular jetton;
It used all the new developments mentioned earlier: dynamic calculation of commissions, libraries for smart contracts;
It was made precompiled by a smart contract;
In addition to testing by the TON Core team, there were code audits by leading auditors Zellic and Trails of Bits, as well as a public bug bounty contest with a $100,000 prize pool;

Jettons support by exchanges

Note that in 2024, TON jettons were first integrated into global centralized exchanges including Binance, OKX and Bybit.

In addition to consulting help and code examples, the TON Core team has developed a new version of the highload-wallet v3 smart contract, which allows sending many transactions at a time in a secure mode. Top exchanges, payment services and bots are already using it.

Giant coin mintings of big gaming projects

During the year, there were mintings and coin listings of Telegram gaming projects with a huge audience: Hamster Kombat, DOGS, Notcoin, CATS, Catizen, WatBirds, RockyRabbit, X Empire and many others.

According to https://dune.com/whale_hunter/the-open-network-chain:

DOGS became the record holder among memcoins in terms of number of holders (6.3M holders ATH).

Note that the TON blockchain technology allowed all mintings and listings to be completed despite the record load.

The TON Core team provided technical advice to most of the indicated game projects.

Tools and guidelines for mass sending

During the year, best practices for mass token sending were formed. In addition to identifying best practices, TON Core advised popular projects as well as advised emerging services such as TokenTable or Mass Sender in the TON Console.

Mintless Jettons' new technology

Introduced the new TON Mintless Jetton technology. It is a jetton that can be instantly distributed to hundreds of millions of users on the TON blockchain, with network fees costing less than a dollar. The user's ownership of their coins is guaranteed by cryptography and a smart contract.

The TON Core team developed the smart contract, standard and documentation and helped leading wallets, APIs and explorers support the new technology.

Mintless Jetton was successfully applied to the Hasmter Kombat token minting.

Emergence of the Shardchain optimization paradigm

Everyone is used to optimizing network commissions when developing smart contracts. The more optimized the code, the cheaper the smart contract is for the user or product.

As pioneers in the application of asynchronous technologies in blockchain, we have formulated a new paradigm - shardchain optimization. In asynchronous blockchains, developers can optimize their smart contracts and smart contract chains so that operations on them will execute faster. The TON Core team has formulated and published the first guidelines and best practices in this area.

New programming language TOLK

After a series of minor updates and bugfixes to FunC, November 2024 saw the rebranding of the language to TOLK and the major update of TOLK 0.6.

TOLK 0.6 has a familiar syntax for most programmers, as well as significant improvements to the compiler core and versioning and delivering.

After the presentation of TOLK at the Gateway conference, a roadmap for further work on the next versions was formed.

In addition to the language, new development tools have also been developed - the plugin for VS Code and IntelliJ IDEA already support TOLK.

Toncenter API Updates

At the beginning of 2024 we released a new indexer v3, written entirely in C++ and working directly with node. It is up to 10 times faster than the previous version, so we also called it "Turbo Indexer".

In addition to optimizations, methods began to give more information and new APIs for Jettons, NFT and support for address reform.

The following updates added Traces API (transaction chains).

A lot of work has gone into extending the Toncenter API infrastructure and architecture to be more reliable and foult-tolerant and to introduce the ability to add new ton-http-api instances in runtime.

Finally, for those customers who need exceptional performance and uptime, we have added Advanced Plans functionality.

A lot of work has been done to improve and accelerate message delivery on the blockchain.

Q4 was dedicated to working on the new Action API, Emulation API and Pending API, which are already available on the test network and will soon be available on the main network.

New development tools

TON Packages

This year we worked on build systems and now Developers can now install a TON of binaries and libraries (func, fift, lite-client, proxy and other) via apt install (Ubuntu, Debian, Linux Mint), homebrew (Mac), yum install (RedHat, Fedora, CentOS), pamac (Manjaro, RebornOS, Arch Linux) and chocolatey (Windows).

Available on x86-64 and aarch64 (arm64) platforms.

We remind you that you can also download TON binaries for Linux, Mac and Windows from GitHub Autobuilds, or compile it yourself from sources (docs).

Every new TON release automatically appears in autobuilds and package managers

TON Docker & Kubernates

We've also made a big update in building TON under Docker, including MyTonCtrl under Docker, as well as creating an image for Kubernates for popular cloud platforms.

TON Replay

We would like to tell you about an interesting internal solution TON Replay created jointly with DTON team. This solution allows you to take blocks from the mainnet and run them on the specified version of TON node.

When working on TON node updates, we run transactions from the mainnet to make sure we haven't introduced any bugs or broken backwards compatibility.

Retracer

A web service for developers that will show where a particular transaction failed, at what VM step and with what error.

This is an open-source solution and we are encouraging TON explorers to build this functionality directly into their interfaces

Unified tests for TON libraries

You know that TON has libraries for almost every popular programming language. Some of them are created by TON Core developers. Some are created by community developers.

To make sure that all libraries work the same way and without bugs we created a list of baseline tests. We started with covering the library for java - ton4j and the canonical C++ implementation (fift), but we would like all libraries to support these tests.

Library developers, please support this initiative.

MyTonCtrl 2.0 major update

Major version of MyTonCtrl 2.0 has been released - full code refactoring and a lot of improvements, fixes and new functionality added. Note support for multiple types of staking: liquid stakings, nominator pools, single nominators.

In addition, the process of installing a new node via MyTonCtrl has been greatly simplified and the documentation about MyTonCtrl and about starting TON nodes in general has been significantly updated.

In 2024, the number of validators reached 400, with a total stake of 600M TON (more than 10% emission), which guarantees the correctness of the validators. With the growth of validators, the distribution of validators across countries and data centers was even increased.

Restarting the slashing

The system of decentralized penalties for poorly performing validators was relaunched. In addition to the system itself, new validator guidelines and tools were prepared: such as several solutions for validator performance evaluation, APIs and alerts.

You can see in @tonstatus_notifications that there has been a noticeable reduction in the number of bad validators since the system went live.

W5 & Gasless transactions

We've finalized the Wallet 5.0 smart contract originally developed by the Tonkeeper team. A great contribution from Tonkeeper.

Work has been done not only on smart contract, but also on standardization: this smart contract was supported by all leading TON wallets: Tonkeeper, MyTonWallet, Tonhub, TON Space, etc. Now when a new user creates a wallet - by default it is the new version 5.0.

Smart Wallet Contract 5.0 opens up new possibilities:

For example, it allows you to make Gasless transactions, i.e. to make transactions without having Toncoin on your balance to pay network fees.
We are glad to inform you that this functionality works not only in theory but also in practice: Tonkeeper, MyTonWallet, Tonhub wallets allow you to make transactions paying commissions in USDT, as well as in popular NOT, HMSTR. And users actively use it.
Announcement of 2FA and Key recovery [Soon]
Thanks to the extensions functionality, Wallet 5.0 also allows you to do two-factor authorization or key recovery functionality. We can see that this will be in demand by a mass audience of users. Many community teams are already working on 2FA, so we can expect it on the main network in 2025.

Multi-accounts

We would like to note that last year all popular TON wallets gained support for multiple accounts at once. TON Core has developed a number of UX suggestions, in particular to display different versions of smart contracts as separate accounts and suggestions for migration UX to new versions of wallet smart contracts.

Mutisig V2

A new multisig wallet smart contract (a wallet with multiple owners) has been developed:

The new multisig has a distributed design, each action awaiting signature is a separate smart contract
An initial UI supporting TON Connect and Ledger hardware wallets has been developed
As with the Stablecoin contract, in addition to our testing, the multisig has passed Zellic and Trails of Bits audits and a public bug bounty contest
Community teams have built multisig support into their products, for example, note the multisig UI in Tonkeeper Pro.

Ledger updates

Since TON's release on Ledger in December 2023, the Tontech team has released a number of useful Ledger updates: improved support for popular tokens, NFT, staking, vesting and other operations.

The TON Core team provided the necessary consulting and testing assistance.

TON Payment Network Beta

The beta version of our L2 solution has been released. Payment Network based on payment channels. It allows you to make instant micropayments with micro commissions.

Developers can already familiarize themselves with the beta version, taking into account that the solution has not been fully tested and audited yet.

Note that Payment Network supports garlic routing, and this is the last step towards an anonymous TON Proxy with payment in Toncoin for traffic.

BTC Teleport in Testnet

RSquad's team of blockchain experts has developed a unique system of cross-chain Bitcoin transfers between the Bitcoin network and the TON network without intermediaries. The validity of transfers is confirmed entirely on smart contracts and validators of the TON network.

The bridge was launched on TON's test network in November 2024.

The TON Core team participated in shaping the idea of TON Teleport, provided necessary consulting assistance to the RSquad team during the development process, contributed new opcodes to TVM, supported TON Teleport in the MyTonCtrl validator tool and prepared the extra-currency technology.

Incidents overview

Although the percentage of slow blocks did not exceed 0.07% for the year, the network experienced two blockrate stoppage incidents:

December 2023 - during the "inscriptions" crypto trend when many users sent simple transactions with a text comment to a single address. (10% of all historical tx were generated). Postmortem.
September 2024 - while minting and listing tokens of the DOGs gaming project with 50M monthly active users. Postmortem.

The TON Core team eliminated the problems and carried out network restoration work.

Both incidents are not related to any global problem in the blockchain architecture. The TON blockchain has an architecture inherently designed for scaling. The incidents were related to bugs in the code that manifest themselves in certain rare circumstances, misconfiguration of validators, and weak validator hardware.

The TON Core team took a serious approach to investigating these issues and fixing the bugs: the system of penalties for bad validators was restarted and a number of node updates were made.

In September 2024, Hamster Kombat, a project with 100M monthly active users, minted and listed its tokens. Although the number of transactions exceeded what was on Inscriptions and the number of users exceeded what was on DOGS - the blockchain handled the event without block stoppages.

TON Core has also prepared a huge Accelerator Update that is designed to dramatically improve network stability and throughput, making infinite sharding possible. Read about it in TON Core Roadmap 2025.

TON Core Technologies LLC

For full transparency, we have incorporated TON Core Technologies LLC in Dubai. The TON Core team continues to develop the technology and open source code of The Open Network on a non-commercial basis.

Appendix

Despite the fact that the TON Core team did not participate in the Telegram updates, we consider it important to mention the main points of TON integration into Telegram in 2024.

Appendix: TON Browser in Telegram

Telegram this year made the TON browser directly in the messenger, allowing TON Sites to be opened by decentralized TON DNS domain names to its one billion users.

Appendix: Telegram Integration

This year saw significant updates and announcements highlighting TON's deepening integration with Telegram. Building on the Wallet's integration into Telegram's settings menu in 2023, TON further expanded its role within the platform.

In February, Telegram launched a rewards program for channel owners, with Toncoin as the exclusive payment method. Simultaneously, Telegram enabled Toncoin payments for ads via Fragment.

In June 2024, Telegram also introduced Telegram Stars, an in-app payment solution for digital goods in Mini Apps and comments. Alongside this, Major, a star-collecting game, attracted 70 million users within five months. Fragment now serves as the platform for purchasing and withdrawing Telegram Stars.

On January 1, 2025, Telegram introduced a gifts feature that allows users to transform limited-edition gifts into unique collectibles, transferable within Telegram or externally as NFTs on TON.