The Open Network

The next generation network aiming to unite all blockchains and the existing Internet.

TON blockchain was launched by the founders of Telegram — Doctor Nikolay Durov and Pavel Durov — and later handed over to our open TON Community which has been supporting and developing it since then.

Telegram Channel Github

Primer

TON executive summary

Whitepaper

TON technical description

Wallets

Create and import wallets

Services

3rd-party apps and dapps

Explorer

Get transaction details

Beta

Bridge

TON Coins cross network transfers

Key Components

Apart from processing millions of transactions per second, TON blockchain-based ecosystem has all the chances to give rise to a genuine Web3.0 Internet with decentralized storage, anonymous network, DNS, instant payments and various decentralized services.

TON Blockchain
Launched

The backbone of The Open Network is a scalable multi-blockchain that is designed to process millions of transactions within seconds. It uses the Proof-of-Stake consensus and can contain up to 292 accompanying blockchains.

TON Payments
90% Ready

TON Payments is a platform for micropayments and a micropayment channel network. It can be used for instant off-chain value transfers between users, bots, and other services. Safeguards built into the system ensure that these transfers are as secure as on-chain transactions.

TON Proxy
75% Ready

TON Proxy is a network proxy/anonymizer layer for TON nodes. Similar to I2P, it allows building decentralized VPN services and blockchain-based TOR alternatives to achieve anonymity and protect online privacy. Combined with the TON P2P Network and TON DNS, TON Proxy gives decentralized apps immunity to censorship.

TON DNS
90% Ready

TON DNS makes blockchain mainstream by assigning human-readable names to accounts, smart contracts, services and network nodes. With TON DNS browsing blockchain becomes similar to surfing the World Wide Web.

TON Storage
50% Ready

TON Storage is a distributed file-storage technology accessible through the TON P2P Network. Think a better version of Dropbox for simplicity. This torrent-like technology relies on smart contracts for availability and has a strong potential with regard to storing and exchanging large amounts of data.

TON Services
Launched

TON Services provides a versatile platform for third-party services. It enables smartphone-like friendly interfaces for decentralized apps and smart contracts, as well as a World Wide Web-like decentralized browsing experience.

TON provides a searchable registry of decentralized services and applications.

TON Workchains
50% Ready

TON consists of the masterchain and up to 232 workchains with different rulesets, i.e. different formats of account addresses and transactions, virtual machines for smart contracts and basic cryptocurrencies, etc. Yet, workchains can still interact using consistent basic rules.

Today there is a wide variety of operating blockchains that are loosely connected to one another. Current attempts to use Bridging to establish interaction between them leave much to be desired in terms of both performance and decentralization levels. TON design will allow pooling all existing blockchains into a unified decentralized network.

TON Commandments

Exchanging value should be as easy as exchanging information and blockchain technology ideally service the purpose. With this goal in mind we worded the key principles of TON design and development:

  • Speed and scalability to process millions transactions per second, accommodating an unlimited number of active users and sustaining operations of numerous apps.
  • Intuitive user interfaces to make blockchain about people, not geeks and nerds, to help everyone buy, store and transfer assets in a convenient, familiar way.
  • Decentralization to ensure reliability, stability and safety and to take steps towards a safer, self-governed world.
TON Timeline
TON Coin History
2018
Failing to find a suitable blockchain in the market to accommodate their ambitious ecosystem plans, Pavel and Nikolai Durov backed by a unique developer team embarked on creating TON: the next-gen blockchain with Gram coin. 
2018
The Telegram team raised $1.7bn in a private ICO to launch Gram. 
2019
Having put a huge effort into the project, the team completed design and development of the core TON components, drafted documentation.

The Telegram team launched the first TON test network in Spring 2019, then the code was open-sourced and testnet2 started on November 15, 2019. 
11 Oct 2019
Out of the blue the US SEC announced an emergency action against Gram and obtained temporary restraining order against Telegram on alleged unregistered, ongoing digital token offering in the U.S. and overseas that has raised more than $1.7 billion of investor funds.

Telegram argued SEC claims were ungrounded but agreed to postpone the network and coin launch till all legal matters are resolved.

Investors accepted Telegram’s suggestion to revise the launch date. 
Mar 2020
Telegram threw the towel in its battle with the US regulator that prohibited the issuance of Gram. All resistance appeared to be futile.  
May 2020
The Telegram team shut the project down and stopped supporting testnet2 after obtaining the court approval of settlements that involved a penalty of $18.5m. Yet, Telegram has neither denied nor accepted charges.

The company then made it up with investors and suggested a money back road-map. It was then that independent developers and teams picked up the TON flag and continued the project. 
May 2020
Two developers known as @tolya-yanot and @rulon initiated Newton open-source community aimed at further development and support of TON on the open source principles.

More developers who never worked for Telegram, members of the open developer community, validators, winners of public TON Blockchain Contests and crypto enthusiasts from all over the world joined them. 
May 2020 — May 2021
Upon researching TON source code, architecture and documentation, Newton resumed developing in compliance with the original whitepaper and ideas. 
May 2021
Testnet2 remains stable for a long time and the community votes for renaming it as Mainnet. Newton team, in turn, is renamed as TON Foundation — a not-for-proft community focused on further support and development of the network.  
1
When testnet2 later renamed as Mainnet was launched, 5bn coins were generated with a small fraction (1.45% of the total supply) distributed between testers and developers.
2
After the court ruling prohibiting Gram, the Telegram team gave up TON blockchain development with the most part of testnet2 coins (98.55% of the total supply) transferred to Proof-of-Work Giver smart contracts. So, mining coins is only possible through calling these smart contracts which takes a solid computation capacity.
3
At the point when testnet2 was renamed as Mainnet coins had already been organically distributed between a large number of various users. The price was determined by the cost of mining hardware.

TON Coin Factsheet

Distribution of TON Coins reminds the way coins were organically distributed in early days of the Bitcoin network. In other words, no ICOs or airdrops took place.

5BN
Total coin supply
70,172
Total account number
112M
Total validators' stake
73M
PoW Givers' holdings
18.9M
TON Foundation holdings

The annual inflation rate derived from the fundamental parameters of TON is 0.6%. This inflation represents a payment made by all members of the community to the validators for keeping the system functional.

Getting TON Coins

Hurry up

to mine before PoW Givers are not dry

Use bridge

if you have Wrapped TONCOIN in Ethereum or BSC

Become a validator

and get your revenues

Buy/exchange

TON Coins at third-party services

Wait for TON Storage, TON Proxy and TON DNS

to join them and earn coins

TON Coin Uses

As the ecosystem expands, we see a huge potential of TON coin and numerous ways for it to work in the new economy. We expect it to go beyond a means of payment.

  • Stakes deposited by validators to be eligible to validate transactions and generate new blocks and coins.
  • Voting power to support or oppose changes in the parameters of the protocol.
  • Income (gas) paid to validator nodes as reward for processing transactions and smart contracts under the PoS consensus.
  • Loans to validators extended against a share of their reward.
  • Payment for services and options implemented by TON Services, TON Storage, TON DNS, TON Proxy, TON WWW. In particular, for bypassing censorship, storing data, hiding identity, using blockchain-based domain names.

TON Foundation

After Telegram was forced to quit the project, the open-source developer community led by @rulon and @tolya-yanot went on developing and supporting the blockchain sticking to the original whitepapers where possible.

By now over 40 independent non-incorporated developers from various geographies work on the project as TON Foundation not-for-proft community funded by donations. You can find their profiles on GitHub section People.

We welcome all developers to join TON Foundation and contribute to the technology.

Governance

TON design ensures that network modifications are only possible if approved by the majority of validators via Proof-of-Stake consensus.

There is no way to change network software, configuration or state bypassing the vote.