What is the Free TON Network?

Conceived by the man behind Telegram, scaled by community

The source code for the Free TON Network was created by Pavel Durov, the man behind the extremely successful Telegram and Vkontakte platforms. However, following the SEC’s dissatisfaction with the token sale, the entrepreneur’s involvement soon ended.

The Telegram project was picked up by Free TON, a collective of 23 different companies who decided to take the project’s original code and build on top of it to launch the Free TON network. 17 validators along with the community took the platform to full decentralization. In one short year, the network grew to over 400 validators and has since replaced almost all of the original protocols including the core. 

Free TON is the only network to develop full end-to-end decentralization, where NFTs live on-chain and users can interact directly with the blockchain without using a middleman (ie. Metamask). The release of the whitepaper explains why the original code can not accommodate what Free TON is now capable of.

Due to Free TON’s competitive angle of proven superior speed, reliability, and security, the platform has garnered a faithful group of supporters and allies. Notable upcoming integrations with World Chess–the largest global chess organization with over 50 million monthly active users–and DeTickets–one of the largest ticketing platforms with over 15,000,000 monthly users–is certainly turning heads and garnering interest among enterprises and other entities which require networks to handle both heavy and near-instant processing.

The type of partners which require support by both heavy processing power and speed is a good example of how the Free TON DeFi Alliance has become a center of gravity in the blockchain space. Drawing together a diverse fabric of industry expertise for developers, the Alliance serves to help projects with onboarding, developing their products, and raising capital, among other services. The DeFi Alliance functions as a guide with unique insights about the Free TON network and how to enter the ecosystem for venture capital investors. The Alliance is composed of 7 companies: Broxus, Warp Capital, BlockRock Capital, MinerGate, Bitscale Capital, MTX Connect, and Pi Capital Union.

Free TON uses its decentralized architecture based on smart contracts, and its ecosystem belongs to a 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. Moreover, Free TON has never issued a token sale, or ICO and has no plans to do so. Tokens are distributed via contests and participate in the network. So far, over £140 million in rewards have been distributed. 

How Does Free TON Work?

The Free TON project is based on the TON Blockchain. An ecosystem that allows users to create a global marketplace where anybody from ordinary people to multinational companies, can freely interact with each other. It is best to think of the TON Blockchain as a collection of blockchains. Thanks to this, the throughput of the platform is capable of reaching millions of transactions per second. Free TON is touted as a super-platform, which combines several types of blockchain:

• Masterchain contains the main rules of the protocol and 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, different work chains can contain a different set of rules from the rest, including address formats, virtual machines, and even cryptocurrencies following the principles of interoperability.

• Shard Chains or work chain segments. They are also called horizontal blockchains. Each work chain can be divided into 260 more homogeneous shard chains, which are already united by the same rules and block formats defined by the work chain.

• And finally, the last layer is the shards that make up the shard chain. Shards are made up of a chain of homogeneous blocks, but the blocks themselves are separate blockchains, which are called vertical blockchains. This structure allows you to fix incorrect blocks in the shard without changing the entire blockchain.

Proof-of-Stake 

TON Blockchain uses the Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism to generate new blocks in shard chains and master chains. The platform network consists of several hundred validators or 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 master chain, 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 loss 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. 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?

The cryptocurrency TON Crystal is the fuel of the 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. Instead, the only way to get TON Crystals 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 jury member. Become a network validator or delegate coins to it, if you already have them, to earn additional TON crystals.
• Develop improvements and promote the Free TON platform.
• Participate in bounty programs, complete various tasks, or receive coins for free.
• Buy tokens from users who have already earned them.

Free TON Tokenomics

The Free TON project does not have a CEO, marketing, or human resources department. Instead, It is governed by the whole community united by one ambition — to create a global and transparent fair economy.

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. Moreover, a proposal is only implemented if more than 50% of the votes are in its favor.

Where to Store TON Crystal

The TON Labs team developed a universal crypto wallet called 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. Some network partners have created TON-compatible wallets as well as integrated TON tokens on their platforms:

• TON Crystal Wallet (the main DeFi ecosystem wallet) — a secure multifunctional wallet and Free TON dapp transport for Chrome.
• KiloX Wallet – store, exchange, stake, and earn TON Crystal.
• Chatex – simple and convenient crypto wallet.

Staking TON Crystal tokens

The concept of staking itself does not fundamentally differ from the classic PoS consensus mechanism, except for the primary distribution of tokens. Validators stake cryptocurrency to obtain the rights to validate transactions and blocks on the TON network. So far, delegation is available to the community only in the web version of the TON Surf application. However, the TON development team plans to expand the app’s functionality and staking capabilities in the future.

In Summary

Free TON is currently fully engaged in developing its DeFi offerings. Free TON’s first DeFi product, the TON-Ethereum Bridge, which allows users to move liquidity back and forth between the Ethereum and Free TON blockchains at high speeds and with fractional fees, was created by Broxus, a team of developers that have come together to form a blockchain solutions laboratory. The same team of developers launched Free TON’s TON Swap, the platform’s DEX. With a plethora of upcoming DeFi products in the works, Free TON has joined DappRadar to open up what it has to offer to the wider DeFi community.

Free TON is a community of peers and Freeton.org acts as the gateway to all the projects, activities, interests, other websites, and work that’s happening now within the ecosystem.

Users are encouraged to use the website like a master catalog to quickly and easily identify areas where your talent, identity, belief system, and know-how are relevant and necessary to scale the network. Tags on the site are words or phrases that help users search and match their talents to community groups and projects that share their interests. 

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