TON Is Now Up to 6x Faster: Sub-Second Finality Is Live
TON now confirms transactions in approximately one second, down from around ten seconds before.
As of April 10, 2026, sub-second finality is live on mainnet. This is not a performance benchmark. It is a foundational change to what TON can deliver.
What Changed
The upgrade is powered by Catchain 2.0, a new consensus mechanism that changes how the network agrees on transactions. Blocks now arrive every 400 milliseconds, a new streaming layer pushes updates to apps almost instantly, and the network reaches agreement in a fraction of the time it previously required.
For users, the gap between action and confirmation collapses. Payments go through in about one second, trades execute in real time, and apps respond with the immediacy people already expect from every other product they use. The multi-second delays that previously defined on-chain interactions are gone.
The upgrade also strengthens the economic foundation of the network. More blocks mean more validator rewards, which create stronger staking incentives and bring more TON into the network. TON's annual inflation is expected to rise from around 0.6% to around 3.6% as a result. As staking participation grows, rewards will settle at a new equilibrium.
What This Enables
Sub-second finality is a prerequisite for the kinds of applications TON is positioned to support at scale inside Telegram's ecosystem of more than 1 billion users. Payments that feel like sending a message, trades that execute without lag, and Mini Apps that respond instantly were not fully achievable at ten-second confirmation times. They are achievable now, and the applications built around that speed will define what TON looks like to the next wave of users.
What Developers Need to Do
The blockchain is faster. Apps need to catch up.
The speed improvement is real at the protocol level, but users will only feel it if the products they use surface it correctly. That means moving from polling-based updates to streaming APIs, which push real-time state changes to the application rather than waiting for the app to request them. Developers who make that upgrade deliver sub-second UX to their users. Those who do not will still appear slow, even though the underlying network is not.
Recommended stack: Streaming API v2 for real-time status updates, TON Center v3 or TONAPI for the data layer, and AppKit for balances, tokens, and contract interactions.
Now Live
The upgrade is running. For developers, the next step is integrating streaming APIs. For everyone building on TON across payments, trading, and consumer apps, the infrastructure is ready.
TON is now real-time. Build accordingly.
