TON Rebirth: The Open Network’s Technological Progress and Future Prospects

Author: cynicsong.eth Source: mirror 

TON Past

In 2018, the Durov brothers, founders of Telegram, began to explore blockchain solutions for Telegram. At that time, no blockchain could support Telegram's 100 million-level user base, so they decided to design their own Layer 1 chain, named Telegram Open Network, or TON for short.

A few months later, through the ICO of TON's native token $Grams, TON raised more than 1.7 billion US dollars. In 2019. The Telegram team successively released relevant documents and launched two test networks.

In October 2019, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) sued Telegram, accusing it of conducting an unregistered securities offering. The Telegram team suspended the launch of TON's mainnet, and eventually gave up in the fight with the SEC, stopping the development of TON and returning the ICO funds to investors.

In 2020-2021, the NewTON team restarted the development of TON based on open source materials. In May 2021, the community voted to rename the long-term stable test network 2 to Mainnet. The NewTON team also changed its name to the TON Foundation, as a non-profit community to support and develop TON.

This is the TON we are familiar with now, the full name is The Open Network.

Of the Network

From the very beginning of the story, TON was built for social networks with a large number of users, and TON Blockchain is Telegram's blockchain. Back then, under the outdated technical system, the TPS of the mainstream blockchain could not be effectively improved. How could it carry Telegram's hundreds of millions of users and the millions of transactions per second that might be generated?

The idea of ​​the TON team is that the TPS of a single blockchain can only reach dozens of times per second, so why not build more chains? TON uses sharding technology to horizontally distribute the work of processing transactions to multiple chains, building a blockchain network composed of multiple blockchains, called the blockchain of blockchains.

Specifically, TON Blockchain adopts a pyramid-shaped three-layer architecture, each layer accommodates a type of blockchain, namely masterchain, workchain and shardchain.

The Masterchain is the only one that coordinates the work of the TON Blockchain. The chain contains the parameters of the protocol, the set of Validators, and the current work of the Workchains and the subordinate Shardchains for the share. The lower chain will submit its latest block hash to the Masterchain, so that when the lower chain needs to read a cross-chain message, it can determine the latest status.

Masterchain plays a role of coordination and anchoring, while the real work is done by Workchains. The system can accommodate up to 2^32 Workchains. Each Workchain can flexibly customize rules, such as address format, transaction type, native token, smart contract virtual machine, etc., on the premise of meeting interoperability standards. It is worth noting that Workchain is just a virtual concept. It exists as a collection of Shardchains, but not an entity.

To improve processing efficiency, each Workchain will be further divided into Shardchains, up to 2^60. Shardchain abides by the rules set by Workchain and distributes the work level to all Shardchains. Each Shardchain only serves a part of the total account set.

For common sharding, sharding is top-down, and the division condition is often the prefix of the account address. For example, if the Workchain is divided into 256 shards on average, accounts with address prefixes of 0x00, 0x01, ... 0xFE, 0xFF will be assigned to different Shardchains. In TON's sharding mechanism, sharding is a bottom-up dynamic process. It is more appropriate to imagine that each account is first treated as a Shardchain, and then combined into a larger Shardchain based on the connection between them to ensure that each Shardchain has a sufficient number of transactions.

Now let's look back at the architecture diagram of TON Blockchain. Does it look similar to the network architecture? We have reason to believe that the Durov brothers, who came from the network industry, were inspired by the network architecture when designing TON. In the initial situation, each network device worked independently as a single point (each account was a Shardchain). Since some network devices communicated frequently, they were combined into a local area network (from a single point Shardchain to a larger Shardchain), and different local area networks communicated with the help of upper-level nodes (Shardchains interoperated through Masterchain).

TON Blockchain is actually another form of network, which is TON of the network.

By the Network

As a distributed system, the nodes of the blockchain need to communicate through a P2P network, rather than through a centralized server and CS architecture. For single blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, the need to propagate blocks and transactions through the gossip protocol can be met, but for TON, the multi-chain architecture puts higher requirements on the network protocol.

TON nodes use the Abstract Datagram Network Layer (ADNL) for data transmission. ADNL abstracts the network layer in the traditional TCP/IP layered architecture. In order to facilitate identity identification, nodes do not need to consider IP addresses, but use abstract network addresses (Abstract Network Address) for communication. The address is a 256-bit integer, which is a hash value based on the ECC public key and other parameters, which facilitates the encryption and decryption of communication between nodes, and provides a basis for the segmentation between different Shardchains.

TON uses Kademlia Distributed Hash Table (DHT) to locate other nodes in the network. When the client needs to submit a transaction to the Validator of a Shardchain, it can find the location of the Validator in the DHT through the Key.

The most critical part is the Overlay network. Since different Shardchains are independent and do not care about or have the ability to process transactions on other Shardchains, it is necessary to build an Overlay subnetwork for each Shardchain within the TON Network, which is open to nodes that wish to participate in the communication. The Overlay network communicates internally through a gossip protocol based on ADNL.

Relying on a unique network protocol design, addressing, transmission, and application are finalized separately, TON is able to achieve an unlimited sharding solution and obtain ultra-high TPS, which is TON by the network.

For the Network

In today's era of "millions of chains", if a public chain wants to stand out, it must play to its strengths and avoid its weaknesses, and highlight its own advantages. Ethereum's advantage lies in its TVL and application ecology, Solana's advantage lies in its huge developer ecology, and Arbitrum's advantage lies in its technical reliability and operational capabilities. So what are TON's advantages? When various expansion plans are mature and implemented, and "high performance" is no longer the key factor in determining the success or failure of the chain, how can TON maintain the activity of the ecology?

The answer is the network, one is social network, the other is network service.

From the perspective of social network, we only need to consider what needs users have when using Telegram. There are a lot of import and export trade on Telegram, so there is TON payment, and the wallet built into Telegram has lowered the threshold for use; there is a need for users to show their artistic aesthetics, and TON NFT is a good social tool; playing games with friends is the happiest thing, so GameFi can quickly fission through social networks.

Network services are TON's main business, and everything in the traditional network has been remade by TON, which is called the future of the Internet. The anonymous eSIM realizes the ideal of Telegram when it was founded: a social network that protects privacy; TON domain names improve readability, allowing users to find each other more easily in the TON network; TON URLs, TON proxies, and TON WWW hope to provide everyone with a decentralized, secure, and reliable Internet; TON storage is an upgraded version of Torrent, using decentralized storage to ensure the security of user data.

TON uses blockchain technology not only to obtain funds, but also hopes to build a more decentralized, secure and reliable Internet with the help of blockchain. This is TON for the network.

Conclusion

Unfortunately, judging from the current level of activity of the TON ecosystem, it seems that not many users need a more decentralized, secure and reliable Internet. This is also the problem faced by all current blockchain projects. Most people enter the blockchain ecosystem for gold panning, rather than really needing decentralized services. If there is no wealth-creating effect, it is difficult for the project to gain sustained attention.

Fortunately, the TON ecosystem is not short of money. TON has established an ecological fund of hundreds of millions of dollars to invest in and incubate projects within the TON ecosystem. Relying on the largest number of monthly active users in the entire Web3 world, we have reason to believe that the TON ecosystem will usher in an explosion in the future, which deserves continued attention.