AN OPEN REQUEST TO TELEGRAM TEAM FROM THE OPEN-SOURCE COMMUNITY

It was a sad event for all of us when, in May 2020, the Telegram team was forced to stop working on TON.

As time has shown, many independent developers from all over the world could not forget about that new generation technology.

Over time, an open-source community has emerged bringing together independent developers, validators and blockchain enthusiasts. Many are winners of public TON Blockchain Contests and have shown unwavering interest in TON technology and support for it since 2019.

At the moment, the community project is concentrated around https://github.com/newton-blockchain GitHub repository and posts its updates at https://toncoin.org and in the channel https://t.me/tonblockchain.

We would like to highlight that our community is working on the original TON tech and the network that we are building is based on the testnet2 launched by Telegram in 2019. We updated it and turned it into the mainnet while preserving the original core technology and complying with all the principles laid out in the original documentation.

So far we have released a long list of updates to the networks which, aside of improvements, led to incompatibility of the network with the software available within the https://github.com/ton-blockchain/ton repository and documentation at https://ton.org.

For example, the node software which may be found in the ton-blockchain repository by now already does not allow setting up a validator for the current network due to these changes. And upcoming updates will push this incompatibility even further.

Considering the above, as well as our strong commitment to continuing the support of TON and the quality of our development group participants, we kindly ask you to provide to the community the ownership of the https://ton.org domain and the repository https://github.com/ton-blockchain, all the same, the Telegram team no longer needs them.

We believe that these assets will help us to support the further evolution of your concept in a better way and give it a new, community-driven, life.

Background info

The open-source community has maintained the network since May 2020. Since early 2021, the community has intensified its activities to restore, maintain and further develop the TON network.

During the past 6 months, the following has been achieved:

INFRASTRUCTURE

• The number of validators achieved 115.

• 7 strong lite-servers launched to increase connectivity.

• 3 archive nodes with full network history are fully synchronized and launched.

• Basic services like https://explorer.toncoin.org/ duplicated for stability.

• TON repository autobuild system created.

• A separate testnet for development and testing launched.

• The necessary testnet services launched: bot faucet, test web wallet, https://test-explorer.toncoin.org, https://testnet.toncenter.com, etc.

• https://tonmon.xyz: the network monitoring tool restored.

• https://tonmine.xyz: a tool for monitoring mining on the network launched.

• FreeBSD support added to the TON software.

• Efforts of the open-source community didn’t go unnoticed; we were surprised to find an increase in mining of the PoW Giver smart-contracts. It reached 300-700 Gh/s meaning there are over 1,000 miners in the network. As a result the open-source community collectively voted to rename testnet2 to the Mainnet.

CORE UPDATES

• Several protocol updates have been made, in particular, a versioning added to the catchain.
  Implementing these changes required updating all network validators to the new software. Currently, all network validators use software from https://github.com/newton-blockchain.

• Several votes have been successfully completed for new network configs, in particular, to reduce the minimum number of sharchains to 1 and to increase the shard_validators_num to 23.
  Implementing these modifications required support from the majority of network validators.

• MyTonCtrl tool for validators significantly improved.
  Now becoming a validator only takes running a one-script installation. Afterwards you can use the user-friendly CLI.
  MyTonCtrl is well tested and stable. Currently about 70% of validators use it.

• The functionality to slash cheating or idle validators was investigated.
  Slashing is fully implemented, tested, documented and launched in MyTonCtrl and as a separate script for validators who are not willing to use MyTonCtrl.

• Nominators are an important part of the network; nominators can lend a stake to validators and then receive a part of the validator reward.
  This feature was implemented in the nominator-pool smart contract and is also supported by MyTonCtrl.

• A decentralized bridge between TON and Ethereum (and other EVM networks) was developed and documented.
  A working bridge is launched on the testnet. Launching a one on the mainnet is in the pipeline.

• The process of technical hard fork in case of recovery after a critical network breakdown was researched.

• Scripts and fixes for multisig wallet are added.

CLIENT SERVICES

• Updates and rebuilds of native wallets for Windows, MacOS, Linux, Android, iOS.

• Mobile wallets successfully released to AppStore and GooglePlay.

• A system for auto-building wallets for Windows, MacOS, Linux created.

• Updates and improvements to the Web Wallet and Chrome extension.
  Chrome extension sent to Chrome Store; pending approval.

• https://ton.sh blockchain explorer restored.

• A TON-app for the Ledger hardware wallet created; supported in the Web Wallet.
  TON-app sent to Ledger Live Catalog; pending approval.
  We have also completed work on an improved TON-app v2.0.

• Launched the first version of TON Store: a catalog of third-party TON applications and services.

• Special mention for the first third-party app - @CryptoBot - a Telegram bot that allows storing, transferring and exchanging various cryptocurrencies, including TON Coin. The tool allows you to send coins even if the recipient has no account in the CryptoBot.

• Another interesting third-party tool is @TONMinerBot; it allows purchasing computational resources for mining TON easily.

• Some effort was put into creating a user-friendly bot to help creating and operating a validator node.

DEVELOPER SERVICES

• https://toncenter.com HTTP TON API restored and significantly improved.

• TonWeb JavaScript TON API restored and significantly improved.

• The GraphQL TON API is in the pipeline, the launch is pending.

• Website created to offer all the TON documentation and whitepapers; pending launch.

NON-TECHNICAL

• https://toncoin.org website launched. This site, our whitepaper and @tonblockchain Telegram channel offer actual information.

• New developers joined to the TON Developers & Validators group with the total number exceeding 40.

• A community fund that consists of TON Coins donations is built.

The community plans to go on supporting and developing the TON blockchain & network. In particular by launching TON Storage, TON Proxy, TON DNS, TON Payments in compliance with the original whitepapers wherever possible.

For more information on the main community developers, check https://github.com/orgs/newton-blockchain/people. Note that there are also many other people who have contributed to TON.

Very soon the community will introduce more protocol updates. Like all core changes, these will require support of all network participants and validators.

Clearly, it would be preferable to store the community code at https://github.com/ton-blockchain with the information posted at https://ton.org.

Therefore, we would like to ask you to transfer the rights to manage the https://github.com/ton-blockchain repository and https://ton.org domain to the open-source community.

For communication, please contact @tolyayanot.