TON (4)

Telegram co-founders sought for a Blockchain whose native currency would be called $Gram.

The US SEC of course refused to let this happen.

Now this was their argument as opined by Mr Pavel and I quote :

"Unfortunately, a US court stopped TON from happening. How? Imagine that several people put their money together to build a gold mine – and to later split the gold that comes out of it. Then a judge comes and tells the mine builders: "Many people invested in the gold mine because they were looking for profits. And they didn't want that gold for themselves, they wanted to sell it to other people..

.....

Because of this, you are not allowed to give them the gold."

If this doesn't make sense to you, you are not alone – but this is exactly what happened with TON (the mine), its investors, and Grams (the gold). A judge used this reasoning to rule that people should not be allowed to buy or sell Grams like they can buy or sell Bitcoins.

Perhaps even more paradoxically, the US court declared that Grams couldn't be distributed not only in the United States, but globally. Why? Because, it said, a US citizen might find some way of accessing the TON platform after it launched.

So, to prevent this, Grams shouldn’t be allowed to be distributed anywhere in the world – even if every other country on the planet seemed to be perfectly fine with TON.

This court decision implies that other countries don’t have the sovereignty to decide what is good and what is bad for their own citizens. If the US suddenly decided to ban coffee and demanded coffee shops in Italy be closed because some American might go there – we doubt anyone would agree.

And yet, despite that, we have made the difficult decision not to proceed with TON.

Till now I still don't understand this ruling 😂.

The Telegram Open Network project began in the year 2018, long story cut short, as at May 2020 Telegram co-founders withdrew from this project and renounced engagements with it.

However, Telegram Open Network was built as an open-source ledger (this simply means that it's base code is accessible to the public, usually in GitHub), hence another team of developers began to work on the project.

With regards to this, Telegram Open Network was rebranded to The Open Network, and in the same way, $Ton became the native currency of The Open Network instead of $Gram.

Summarized account

Pavel's tweet (couldn't be added)

Sec vs telegram

Others

and here too

Ton on CoinMarketCap

Stats about Ton, check here

I couldn't give a particular value as $ Ton is a cryptocurrency, the value fluctuates.

So check it out and see the current values for the

- price

- circulating supply

- Maximum Supply

- Total Value Locked

- etc

Ton Blockchain specifically is an open-source, permission-less Blockchain with a focus on decentralization, scalability and massive adoption.

Futuristically, it will pave the way for the web3nization of Telegram.

Well, you may be surprised...

Since Telegram has renounced engagements with TON, while then will TON pave way for web3nization of Telegram?

The answer lies here ↑↑↑

Around December 2021, Pavel Durov made a post supporting The Open Network.

Ton Blockchain is like a foundation powering a more to robust ecosystem, The TON Ecosystem.

The TON Ecosystem consists of :

1. TON Blockchain, the foundation
2. TON DNS
3. TON STORAGE
4. TON PROXY
5. TON SERVICES
6. TON SITES
7. and TON PAYMENTS

- the native currency powering the TON Ecosystem

- it's both a utility and a governance token

- It's the only currency used for the payment of gas fees in the Ecosystem for transactions (financial and non-financial)

- It's also a criterion if one wants to became a validator

- Holders of $TON will also have a say in the Ecosystem, that's to say that they can vote for or against certain decisions in the Blockchain.

PoS, Proof of Stake

TON uses the POS consensus mechanism.

Basically, prospective validators will have to stake a minimum of 300,000 Ton coin to be able to validate transactions in the Blockchain.

Validators that participate in validating transactions will receive a fraction of the gas fees paid as incentives, plus the minted tokens as a result of addition of blocks.

It may interest you to know that aforetime, TON operated on a PoW consensus, where individuals, corporations and early adopters mined $TON coins freely.

About 98% of $TON was distributed this way, and after that, TON transitioned to using the Proof of Stake consensus

Worthy of note is the role that validators or miners play in any Blockchain (cryptocurrency Blockchain especially). Validators or miners actually help to secure these Blockchains. This is the reason why a cryptocurrency Blockchain cannot be analysed without talking about the consensus mechanism of that particular Blockchain.

In the TON Blockchain, validators using the PoS consensus, help to secure the network.

Thinking about malicious actors?

One of the ways the network ensures security is by having in it's smart contract that 66% of the validators will have to reach consensus or .....

.....agreement before a particular list of proposed transactions can be added as a new block to the chain of blocks already in the Blockchain. With this method, it would be difficult for malicious actors to manipulate and cause harm to the Blockchain.

Another way is that not only are validators rewarded for actively validating transactions, but are also punished for :

- not actively validating transactions, or

- validating faulty transactions.

The punishment can range from :

- witholding staked tokens completely or partly,

- suspension

- or definite expulsion.

Transactions per second.

Ton is actually very scalable. They're geared towards making crypto transactions as easy as sending a text message in our social apps, like Telegram.

on a very good day, we will look into TPS of various Blockchain

Ton is a Blockchain of Blockchains, literally.

This is their secret to being very scalable.

Did you wonder why I called Ton, the royal Supplanter?

Let me make it clear now.

Probably you're already aware that the convention of various crypto projects, building from ground up -layer 1- is to build, then scale later. TON took a different approach.

What's that approach?

To scale as you build.

Technically speaking, their sharding method is from ground to top against the conventional top to ground adopted by various Blockchains, notable examples including : Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana , Eos, etc.

Ton is made of 4 chains, 2 real and 2 virtual.

The Master chain, the major chain of the network

The Work chain, first virtual chain

The Shard chain, the second real chain

...and the Account chain, very unlikely but the 2nd virtual chain.

So the account chain is governed by the Shard chain, the Shard by the work chain, and the work by the Master chain.

Validators are assigned to validate transactions right from the Shard chains before a block can then be added to the Master chain signifying that the transaction has been finalized.

Validators are randomly distributed to validate different shards, so a given validator may only validate one Shard at a time and not all shards, but all validators MUST engage in consensus to validate the block of transactions that will be added to the Master chain.