What is Free TON and how TON blockchain benefits a wide range of industries, from serving government systems to financial and IT projects

The Telegram Open Network project, launched by Russian entrepreneur Pavel Durov, has become one of the most sensational projects of 2018. During its private token sale, TON raised $ 1.7 billion from private investors, making it the largest ICO project to raise such a large amount in a short time.

But due to problems with the SEC, Pavel Durov had to curtail the project and hand it over to independent developers, making it open, and returning the collected funds to investors. After that, the project was renamed to Free TON. In this article, we will explain what Free TON is and how it will benefit various industries.

What is Free TON

Free TON is a high-performance, scalable and secure blockchain platform with a throughput of millions of transactions per second. For comparison, the VISA payment system is capable of processing only 1,700 transactions per second. Even one of the fastest blockchains, Solana (SOL), is only capable of handling 65,000 TPS, making Free TON the fastest platform in the world. TON users will be able to make transactions for less than $0.01 in fees, and pay less than $0.05 per coin exchange transaction (swaps).

For the first time, the emergence of the project, then called the Telegram Open Network or simply TON, was announced by Pavel Durov back in December 2017 and caused a lot of agitation in the blockchain community: it was during this period that a real boom took place in the crypto market, and new projects attracted a lot of attention from investors.

But Telegram Open Network is not just another ICO project created with the aim of raising as much investment as possible to leave the platform to its own devices. Behind the creation of TON is a team that has designed one of the largest messengers around, Telegram, whose audience in 2018 consisted of more than 200 million users. In 2021, this number has already exceeded 500 million.

After a long preparation, it became clear that the project was not destined to continue working: in October 2019, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filed a lawsuit against Pavel Durov in connection with unregistered sales of GRAM tokens, which the regulator classified as an analogue of shares. After a long lawsuit, the District Court of New York ruled to cease the launch of the project, after which Durov announced in the media that the Telegram Open Network was officially closing.

But this does not mean that the platform itself was not meant to be implemented. The fact that the project will be renamed The Open Network was announced back in 2018 in the Whitepaper of the project. After the end of the trial, the open source code was published on GitHub, and three new but already independent projects were formed from the Telegram Open Network: Free TON, NewTON and TON Community Blockchain.

Free TON uses its own decentralized architecture based on smart contracts, and its ecosystem belongs to DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization). The purpose of the platform is to create an environment for various services and ordinary transactions serving governments, private companies and users. In other words, Free TON has the potential to become a global platform covering various areas, or, as it is also called, a “super server”. 

How does TON Blockchain work?

TON Blockchain is a heterogeneous and interoperable multiblockchain-platform with smart contracts that is Turing-complete meaning that is completely self-sufficient. The Free TON project is based on the TON Blockchain. The ecosystem of the platform allows you to create a global marketplace where any actors, be they ordinary people or companies, can freely interact with each other.

The concept multi means that the TON Blockchain is a collection of blockchains. Thanks to this, the throughput of the platform is capable of reaching millions of transactions per second. Free TON can be called without hesitation a super-platform, which combines several types of blockchain:

• Masterchain, which contains the main rules of the protocol and which defines a set of validators, as well as the principles of distributing bets and shards – blockchain segments that are processed by this or that validator.
• Workchains, the number of which in the network reaches 232, which is approximately equal to 4.3 million. They contain transactions transmitted to smart contracts. Moreover, they have heterogeneity: different workchains can contain a different set of rules from the rest, including address formats, virtual machines, and even cryptocurrencies in accordance with the principles of interoperability.
• Shardchains or workchain segments. They are also called horizontal blockchains. Each workchain can be divided into 260 more homogeneous shardchains, which are already united by the same rules and block formats defined by the workchain.
• And finally, the last layer is the shards that make up the shardchain. Shards are made up of a chain of homogeneous blocks, but the blocks themselves are actually separate blockchains, which are called vertical blockchains. This structure allows you to fix incorrect blocks in the shard without changing the entire blockchain.

As follows from the description, the TON Blockchain has a heterogeneous multi-level structure, organized according to the principle of sharding or segmentation. Dynamic sharding is implemented in the multi-chain. 

Proof-of-Stake to generate new blocks

TON Blockchain uses the Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism to generate new blocks in shardchains and masterchains. The platform network consists of several hundred validators – nodes that have staked a large amount of TON Crystal tokens by making a special transaction in the master chain, which gives them the right to generate and validate new blocks.

For each block in the masterchain, a pseudo-randomly selected order is set to determine which candidate block has the highest priority to enter the blockchain.

Validators and other nodes of the TON Blockchain network check the validity of the proposed candidate blocks. If the validator signs an invalid candidate block, they receive a penalty in the form of partial or complete deprivation of the stake, or suspension from the validator role for some time. After that, the validators must reach a consensus to choose which block will go to the blockchain next using an efficient BFT (Byzantine Fault Tolerant) protocol, which is similar to PBFT or Honey Badger BFT. If a consensus is reached, a new block is created and the transaction fees paid and generated tokens are shared between network validators.

What is TON Crystal and how to get it

The cryptocurrency TON Crystal is the main fuel of the Free TON ecosystem. Initially, 5 billion coins were issued, the number of which will grow by 2% every year. The accrual of TON Crystal cryptocurrency is based on fair distribution. Initially, users cannot buy it. The only way to get TON Crystal is to contribute to the development of the Free TON ecosystem.

This can be done in several ways:

• Participate in various competitions or evaluate competitive projects as a member of the jury.
• Become a network validator or delegate coins to it, if you already have them, in order to earn additional TON crystals.
• Develop improvements and promote the Free TON platform.
• Participate in bounty programs, completing various tasks, or receive coins for free during the period of their distribution.
• Buy tokens from users who have already earned them.

Note. The distribution (so-called airdrop) will take place as soon as the Free TON network reaches full decentralization. In order not to miss this and other important events, follow the announcements in the official channels, links to which you can find on the project website.

Free TON Tokenomics 

The Free TON project does not have a CEO, marketing department or consultants. It is governed by the whole community united by one goal – to create a global and transparent fair economy. And only the community decides how the network will develop.

All suggestions for improving Free TON are published on the project forum  where every member of the community can freely comment, discuss and criticize the document. There are no restrictions: any user can offer anything. After the end of the discussion, all the accepted comments are forwarded through the voting chain. A proposal is implemented if more than 50% of the votes are in its favour.

The Free TON developers have created a unique meritocratic token distribution model based on competition. It happens as follows:

• Community members offer a competition.
• The community reaches a consensus on the fact that the competitive result will benefit the network and the entire community.
• After a consensus has been reached, all community members vote to determine the amount of the budget allocated for the competition, and the composition of the jury.
• Then the competition itself is held, in which all members of the community can participate. 
• Finally, the jury selects the winners, among whom the rewards are then distributed.

This process is familiar to those who participated in voting on DAO platforms, but before it was carried out for the purpose of distributing the issued tokens. Other platforms do organize similar events. For example, the Binance crypto exchange conducts a token giveaway as part of the Launchpad, where coins are distributed among holders of another tokens. However, this approach is also far from perfect, since, firstly, Binance is a centralized platform, and secondly, the advantage clearly remains with those who own the most of cryptocurrency.

The validator competition was one of the first held on the Free TON platform. About 400 validators took part in it, including Everstake. They are now actively supporting the Free TON network. The list of validators is available on the TON.live blockchain browser page.

Where to store TON Crystal

The creators of TON have developed a universal crypto wallet TON Surf , which combines the properties of a blockchain browser and a private messenger. The wallet is available for web platforms, as well as on iOS and Android devices.

Also, some third-party wallets and services have already integrated TON Crystal tokens:

• Simple wallet for the TON Crystal Wallet platform.
• Crypterium mobile crypto wallet.
• The largest community moderation system Telegram Combot.

How can I see my transactions on the Free TON blockchain?

Free TON is an open and transparent platform, so all the transactions can be tracked using the dedicated TON.live block explorer.

Staking TON Crystal tokens

 

The concept of staking itself does not fundamentally differ from the classic PoS consensus mechanism, except for primary distribution of tokens. Validators stake cryptocurrency in order to obtain the rights to validate transactions and blocks on the TON Blockchain network.

 

Note. So far, delegation is available to the community only in the “light” version in the TON Surf application. However, TON developers team plans to expand the app’s functionality and staking capabilities in the future.

 

How the Everstake Validator Engages with the Free TON Community 

 

Everstake has been helping to improve the Free TON ecosystem at different levels from the outset: voting, taking part in the contests, supporting important updates, working on TON Blockchain applications development. The main priority of the Free TON ecosystem is decentralization and supporting the stable operation of the network.

 

The Everstake team actively engages with the Free TON community to provide up-to-date information and helpful materials to explore blockchain innovation.

Follow Everstake on social media to get the latest information from the blockchain industry!

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