LD Capital: The Open Network: Using Telegram to explore the interconnection between Web2 and Web3

August 14th is Telegram’s 10th anniversary. Founder and CEO Pavel Durov proposed in his 10th-anniversary letter that Telegram’s next step is to go beyond information delivery and lead the innovation of social media. Telegram has become one of the most popular communication software due to information encryption and privacy.

This year’s Telegram Bot craze has also attracted market attention, but the Telegram bot only uses the Telegram application as an interface to the Ethereum protocol and does not directly act on the TON chain. The TON chain is transformed from the Telegram Open Network blockchain platform. Telegram Open Network was launched by Telegram in 2017 but had to cease operations due to SEC accusations. Subsequently, the Telegram community renamed the network the Open Network (TON) through voluntary organizations and continued network development and ecological development. At present, the market value of its network governance token TON exceeds that of Polkadot and Polygon, ranking 12th and 6th among public chains. Although Telegram is no longer involved in the development of the TON network, the TON network may still gain huge traffic by binding to Telegram. Telegram bot has also brought about a paradigm shift in user experience based on low-cost and low-threshold entry into Web 3 based on Web 2 applications.

1. Network framework

The structure of TON is a multi-layered, multi-chain structure, including the main chain (master chain), work chain (work chain) and shard chain (shard chain). The main chain is equivalent to the central manager, and the work chain supports smart contracts and decentralized applications (DApps). Different work chains only need to meet unified interoperability standards, similar to Polkadot. Within each worker chain, a shard chain is implemented to enhance scalability and parallel transaction processing, with each shard responsible for a subset of accounts of one type.

TON network currently adopts PoS consensus mechanism. There are three roles in the network: \
1) Verification node: participates in maintaining network security by pledging TON tokens; \
2) Fisherman: detects verification by sending invalid certificates. Whether the node completes the verification task with due diligence, if the verification node passes an invalid certificate, the verification node will be punished. (It takes about 2 years to complete.) \
3) Proofreader: Proof the shard status and adjacent shard status and send them to the verification node. The verification node usually assigns rewards to the proofreader.

2. Roadmap (future)

1/ Enhance the detection and punishment of non-validation nodes.

2/ Jetton cross-chain bridge: allows Jetton tokens created on the TON network to be cross-chained to the BNB Smart Network and Ethereum.

3/ Implement TON storage

4/ In terms of payment, it will support the establishment of a payment channel between any two participants, and any number of instant small payments can be made free of charge. Only when creating and closing channels do you need to pay network fees, etc.

3. Token situation

Telegram Open Network testnet 2 will mint 5 billion tokens after launch, of which 1.45% will be allocated to developers and testers. But soon the SEC banned Telegram from issuing tokens to investors, and Telegram subsequently stopped working on the TON ecosystem. Testnet 2 tokens are put into smart contracts. All available Toncoin (TON) tokens are released through mining. These tokens are placed in a special Giver smart contract, allowing anyone to participate in mining, and the mining deadline is June 28, 2022.

The TON network is a PoS mechanism. According to the white paper, the reward tokens of the PoS network are close to 20% of the amount of pledged tokens, the maximum annual inflation rate is 2%, and the total token supply is expected to double in 35 years. The current inflation rate is 0.6%, the total number of tokens is 5.093 billion, and the circulating supply is 3.441 billion.

Use cases
1/Payment: domain name (DNS), data storage, TON proxy, on-chain gas (50% of transaction fees will be destroyed), cross-chain fees, etc.;< /span>

2/Pledge: To maintain network security, part of the tokens that the verification nodes have fined will be destroyed (the specific proportion is not specified).

3/Governance

4. Network data

The current number of Ton network verification stages is 343, and the pledged amount of TON tokens is 486 million, accounting for 9.5% of the total tokens and 14.12% of the circulating tokens. The number of tokens destroyed was 41,600. Since January 2022, the number of network accounts and active addresses has maintained steady growth. The current total number of accounts is 3.351 million, the number of active addresses is approximately 765,000, the average daily transaction volume is 160,000, and new on-chain addresses are added every day. The number is approximately between 700-900.

Although the number of account addresses exceeds 3 million, there are only 133,000 Jetto wallets, and only a few users are deeply involved in the Ton ecosystem.
(Note: Jetto is the Ton network token standard, and Jetto wallet is a wallet containing any Jetto token.) The number of forged NFTs is 1.194 million. There are 32,000 DNSs sold (the number of ENS domain names that have been forged on Ethereum is 2.574 million), with sales of 6.205 million TON, which is expected to be US$10.67 million at the current price, with an average price of US$333/DNS, which is relatively high.

5. Ecology

Currently, the TON network ecosystem is led by the TON Foundation, which is 100% led by the community.

Since the beginning of 2023, the main activities of the TON Fund include:
1) Regular liquidity funding awards;

2) Universal accelerator program. Launched in May 2023, the accelerator program has a funding limit of US$25 million. The TON Foundation announced projects that will receive funding in the second and third quarters of 2022 and 2023. According to the report, a total of 31 projects were funded in 2022, 10 projects were funded in the second quarter of 2023, and 5 projects were funded in the third quarter, mainly infrastructure.

3) For the Telegram development plan. The TON Fund launched the tApps Center in August, which includes any app that supports the Telegram ecosystem. In September, it launched the web3 Grant program for Telegram. The specific amount was not specified, but the amount for each project is expected to be between US$20,000 and US$50,000.

According to Defillama, TON’s current TVL is 9.85M, and its historical high is only 21.04 M. TON’s ecology is in a very early stage of development.

【DEX】

Megaton Finance

AMM DEX, developed by South Korean blockchain technology company OZYS, was originally built on Klayswap on the Klaytn platform. The current TVL reaches US$4.89 million, accounting for about 50% of TON TVL, dominating the TON DeFi track. Megaton Finance received US$1.5 million in seed round financing in March this year, led by the TONcoin fund, with participation from Cypher Capital, First Stage Labs, Orbs, MEXC Ventures and other institutions. The project token $MEGA is listed on MEXC, and 54% of the tokens are allocated to liquidity providers.

DeDust

Developed by Scaleton, it now supports almost all wallets available in the TON blockchain. DeDust version 2.0 was recently launched. DeDust DEX currently supports token bridging, and users can use its cross-chain bridge to seamlessly transfer tokens between the TON blockchain and Ethereum. The current TVL is 2.56M.

STON.fi

AMM DEX. The transaction fee is 0.3%, of which 0.2% is paid to the liquidity provider and 0.1% is paid to the STON.fi protocol. The current TVL is 2.23M.

【lending】

DAOLama

A lending platform for NFT as collateral, the current TVL is only $160,000.

【NFT Marketplace】

TON Diamonds

It is the main NFT trading market on the TON chain. Ordinary users need to charge a 5% market fee when trading NFT in TON Diamonds. However, users can reduce transaction fees by purchasing official diamond NFTs of different levels.

【other】

Fanzee

The fan engagement platform has received a total of US$2 million in pre-seed round financing, led by TON Foundation and First Stage Labs. Other participants include MEXC Global, Huobi Global, KuCoin Exchange, VLG Capital, Orbs, 3Commas.io and Hexit Capital.

6. Summary

Although the Telegram team is no longer involved in the development of The Open Network, the two parties still cooperate to a certain extent, and The Open Network is also actively embracing the Telegram ecosystem. OpenNetwork is suitable for taking high performance as the cornerstone, using Telegram as the entrance to huge traffic, and providing low-threshold usage scenarios to gain its core competitiveness. However, the current TON ecosystem is still in its very early stages. The projects in the ecosystem are still mainly based on infrastructure, and there is a lack of innovative and playable projects.

Disclaimer：

1. This article is reprinted from [LD Capital]. All copyrights belong to the original author [Jaden, LD Capital]. If there are objections to this reprint, please contact the Gate Learn team, and they will handle it promptly.
2. Liability Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not constitute any investment advice.
3. Translations of the article into other languages are done by the Gate Learn team. Unless mentioned, copying, distributing, or plagiarizing the translated articles is prohibited.