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TON

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The Open Network (TON) is a public proof-of-stake blockchain for smart contracts, applications and payments. It originated as Telegram Open Network, a project developed by Telegram from 2017 to 2020 using a technical design led by Nikolai Durov. Telegram ended its involvement after a United States court prevented the planned distribution of Gram tokens. An independent developer community continued the released code and test network under the name The Open Network.[1]

TON is organized as a collection of interacting chains. A masterchain records network configuration and validator information, while a base workchain contains most user accounts and smart contracts. Workchains can split dynamically into shardchains as activity changes. Smart contracts execute in the TON Virtual Machine (TVM) and communicate through asynchronous messages.[2][3]

The network's native currency is Gram (GRAM), which was called Toncoin until a community vote in 2026. Gram pays transaction, computation, storage and network fees and is used in validator staking.[4][2]

Telegram project

Telegram began developing TON in 2017. Nikolai Durov wrote the original technical whitepapers, including separate specifications for the blockchain and the TVM. The design proposed a proof-of-stake network whose workchains and shardchains could process activity in parallel, together with networking, storage, naming, proxy and payment services.[4][5]

Telegram and its wholly owned subsidiary TON Issuer conducted two private offerings in 2018. They sold contractual rights to future Grams to 171 initial purchasers and raised about US$1.7 billion. Offering documents said that the proceeds would support both the blockchain project and Telegram Messenger.[6]

Telegram released a test client in 2019, published core source code and started a second test network in November of that year.[1] These were test-network milestones rather than the commercial launch described in the original roadmap.

SEC case and Telegram's withdrawal

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission sued Telegram and TON Issuer in October 2019. It alleged that the purchase agreements and intended resale of Grams formed an unregistered securities distribution. On 24 March 2020, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York issued a preliminary injunction preventing delivery of the tokens.[7]

Pavel Durov announced on 12 May 2020 that Telegram would stop working on TON.[8] A final judgment approved in June required the defendants to disgorge US$1.224 billion, with credit for repayments to purchasers, and required Telegram to pay a US$18.5 million civil penalty. Telegram consented without admitting or denying the SEC's allegations.[7] The planned Telegram-issued Grams were never distributed.

Community continuation

After Telegram withdrew, independent developers and validators maintained the open-source code and the surviving test network. A group initially called Newton developed the network further, renamed itself TON Foundation in 2021 and treated the long-running testnet as the community-operated mainnet.[1] The present Open Network Foundation is a non-profit organization based in Zug, Switzerland; it supports the ecosystem but does not operate Telegram.[9]

The continuation network used proof-of-work “giver” smart contracts to distribute most of its initial currency. This was a distribution mechanism: block validation itself uses proof of stake. Once the giver contracts were exhausted, new rewards continued through validation.[1][10]

Architecture

TON currently has a masterchain and a base workchain. The masterchain stores global configuration, system contracts, validator stakes, active workchains and hashes of their latest blocks. The base workchain contains most user accounts and contracts. The protocol permits additional workchains with different address formats, transaction rules or virtual machines, although the maintained documentation identifies only the masterchain and basechain as active.[2]

Each workchain may divide into shardchains. When load passes configured thresholds, validators can split a shard; shards can merge again when demand falls. Accounts are assigned according to address prefixes, and messages can travel between shards and workchains. Because contracts process incoming messages independently, multi-contract operations are asynchronous rather than a single globally synchronous execution.[3]

Validators propose and approve blocks in proportion to stake. In April 2026 the network activated Catchain 2.0 on its mainnet, replacing the earlier consensus implementation with one based on the leader-driven Simplex protocol.[11] A candidate is finalized after votes representing at least two-thirds of participating stake.[12]

TVM executes smart-contract code and represents persistent data through trees of cells. Wallets, fungible “jetton” contracts and non-fungible tokens are smart contracts rather than protocol-level account types.[2]

Network and application services

The maintained documentation describes a group of related components:[13]

  • TON Network uses the Abstract Datagram Network Layer (ADNL), distributed hash tables and overlay networks to carry messages between nodes.
  • TON Storage provides distributed file storage and availability contracts.
  • TON Proxy provides proxying and anonymizing network functions.
  • TON DNS maps human-readable names to accounts, contracts and services; TON Sites use those names for network-hosted sites.
  • TON Payments refers to payment-channel technology intended for repeated off-chain transfers with on-chain settlement.

These components derive from the Telegram-era design, but their current implementations and adoption should not be confused with the launch dates and performance promises in the discontinued 2018–2019 roadmap.

Relationship with Telegram

Telegram did not resume control of the blockchain, but it later adopted TON-based features. In 2022 it introduced collectible usernames and anonymous numbers whose ownership is recorded on TON.[14] Telegram subsequently added Toncoin rewards, TON-hosted sites in its in-app browser and blockchain-backed collectible gifts.[15]

Telegram's rules for bot developers require mini apps that issue or distribute cryptocurrency assets to use TON and TON Connect, apart from limited bridging cases.[16] This makes TON an important part of Telegram's application platform while leaving the network and its supporting foundation organizationally separate from Telegram.

Reliability

On 27–28 August 2024, abnormal transaction load associated with a large token distribution caused TON to stop producing blocks for more than six hours. Validators were instructed to restart nodes, and block production resumed.[17] The incident showed that dynamic sharding does not by itself prevent implementation or validator-operational failures under load.

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 TON: The Open Network primer, TON Foundation, pp. 8–13. Retrieved 11 September 2026.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 “Start here”, TON Docs. Retrieved 11 September 2026.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 “Blockchain sharding”, TON Docs. Retrieved 11 September 2026.
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 “Overview of TON whitepapers”, TON Docs. Retrieved 11 September 2026.
  5. ↑ “Telegram Open Network Virtual Machine”, Nikolai Durov, 23 March 2020. Retrieved 11 September 2026.
  6. ↑ SEC v. Telegram Group Inc. and TON Issuer Inc.: Complaint, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, 11 October 2019, pp. 9–16. Retrieved 11 September 2026.
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 “Telegram to Return $1.2 Billion to Investors and Pay $18.5 Million Penalty to Settle SEC Charges”, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, 26 June 2020. Retrieved 11 September 2026.
  8. ↑ “What Was TON And Why It Is Over”, Pavel Durov, 12 May 2020. Retrieved 11 September 2026.
  9. ↑ “Privacy Policy”, The Open Network Foundation, section 1. Retrieved 11 September 2026.
  10. ↑ “Gram is the native coin of the TON blockchain”, TON Foundation. Retrieved 11 September 2026.
  11. ↑ “How to adopt sub-second finality”, TON Docs. Retrieved 11 September 2026.
  12. ↑ “Catchain 2.0: Simplex Consensus in TON”, TON Core team, 10 March 2026. Retrieved 11 September 2026.
  13. ↑ “Web3 services”, TON Docs. Retrieved 11 September 2026.
  14. ↑ “Topics in Groups, Collectible Usernames, Voice-to-Text for Video Messages and More”, Telegram, 5 November 2022. Retrieved 11 September 2026.
  15. ↑ “Telegram Browser, Gifting Stars and More”, Telegram, 31 July 2024. Retrieved 11 September 2026.
  16. ↑ “Blockchain Guidelines”, Telegram. Retrieved 11 September 2026.
  17. ↑ “TON blockchain was down amid a six-hour outage”, The Block, 28 August 2024. Retrieved 11 September 2026.

See also on BitcoinWiki

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