After my last post, some people expressed concern that, as a result of ad sales exclusively for TON, Telegram may end up holding an unhealthy share of Toncoin, which will be too concentrated for a decentralized ecosystem. We acknowledge these concerns and have come up with a solution.

To limit Telegram’s share of TON at ≈10% of the supply, we’ll be selling the upcoming surplus of our TON holdings to long-term investors — under 1-4 years lockup and vesting plan, but at a discount to the market price. This way free-floating TON will get locked up, stabilizing the ecosystem and reducing volatility.

Potential investors in TON have been actively trying to reach out to us through various means. To make the process of any TON sales from Telegram fair and streamlined, we set up a new email address investors@telegram.org, where large investors ($1M+) can express their interest. Thanks to the participation of more long-term holders, TON will remain stable and decentralized.

😝 Next month, channel owners on Telegram can start receiving financial rewards from their work.

Broadcast channels on Telegram generate 1 trillion views monthly. Currently, only 10% of these views are monetized with Telegram Ads — a promotion tool designed with privacy in mind.

In March, the Telegram Ad Platform will officially open to all advertisers in nearly a hundred new countries. Channel owners in these countries will start receiving 50% of any revenue that Telegram makes from displaying ads in their channels.

To ensure ad payments and withdrawals are fast and secure, we will exclusively use the TON blockchain. Similar to our approach with Telegram usernames on Fragment, we will sell ads and share revenue with channel owners in Toncoin. This will create a virtuous circle, in which content creators will be able to either cash out their Toncoins — or reinvest them in promoting and upgrading their channels 🤑

The highlights of 2023

The most significant of last year's many events:

Mass-adoption:

— TON x Telegram;

Performance:

— World blockchain speed and scalability record;

— 80M transactions in 15 days in mainnet;

Tokenomics:

— Achieving transparency and predictability for more than 66% of tokenomics [1] [2] [3];

— Implementation of the mechanism of burning half of the network fees, achieving deflationary in December;

Recognition:

— The Dubai Financial Services Authority added TON;

— Swiss non-profit TON Foundation;

— The Gateway Conference;

Decentralization:

— Deleting the configuration key;

— Network-wide votings has become commonplace;
Usability:

— Lots of updates to wallets, DEX's, staking, bridge and every service in the TON ecosystem;

Integration:

— TON x Trust Wallet, Ledger, Amazon Web Services, Tencent Cloud, Elliptic, Blockchain.com, Animoca Brands, Bitget Wallet, Atomic Wallet, Changelly and many others;

Technology:

— Zero-Knowledge on TON;

— Constant kernel and developer updates;

Read more detailed review and developer report on the blog.

Validators voted to activate TVM update

Now TON developers even more equipped to develop cutting edge protocols.

Call for Network Validators to get in contact

The TON blockchain is experiencing reduced performance now due to a backlog of transactions in the queue to be validated. We’ve received a response from many validators on the network who have already upgraded using the patch provided this morning.

However, there are still some we have been unable to reach. We need to collect the machine specifications from all validators to progress the upgrade as quickly as possible. If you maintain a TON validator node, please get in touch with us urgently so we can resolve the network performance issues.

You can reach the team via this google form. If you know someone who maintains a validator node on TON, please also feel free to forward this message.

For the last two days, the TON blockchain has realized a new milestone while experiencing a significant slowdown in transaction processing.

No smart contracts or user assets are at risk. All sent messages will be processed.

We're working on fixing the problem.

Tech report »‎

Telegraph

TON Technical Incident Report

For the last two days, the TON blockchain has realized a new milestone while experiencing a significant slowdown in transaction processing. The most substantial periods were on 5 Dec 22:30 - 6 Dec 02:30 (Dubai Time) and 6 Dec 22:45 to the current time. No…

Meet the long awaited TVM update in mainnet

It has undergone months of testing on testnet, bug bounties and been audited by one of the world's best auditor - Trail of Bits.

This update makes TVM one of the most versatile virtual machines around, including the ability to create Zero-Knowledge protocols.

Multiple community teams have already built amazing services using new functionality:
🌪Tonnel Network, 💠Redstone, 💥Evaa, 💎TON Teleport, Clean.ton. There were a lot of great ideas at the TVM hackathon.

Network validators have already updated their software on November 30, and new TVM functionality is scheduled to be enabled on December 12.

Read more about TVM update »
Technical documentation »

Commitment to decentralization

Since its genesis, TON is a decentralized and self-govern blockchain. Any changes and updates in the network are only possible with the consensus of 66% of the validators.

Today we have removed the last element that could be considered as inconsistent with this principle – the configuration key.

The configuration key could be used in case of emergency to change some technical parameters of the network configuration. This key has never been able to modify of arbitrary smart contracts (e.g balance, code or account data changing). But still it was the last element, which removal was needed to achieve full decentralization of the TON blockchain.

https://tonscan.org/tx/i6oRAQLL8keqIuJmLOi-Sf3bsQblB-5NYt7Sn8YcO5o=

Planned Change of the Ecosystem Reserve Address
A planned change of the Ecosystem Reserve address will be performed on Friday, November 3, 2023. This requires transferring the Ecosystem Reserve balance to the new address: EQBmzW4wYlFW0tiBgj5sP1CgSlLdYs-VpjPWM7oPYPYWQEdT.

This transfer is not a response to any security breach or compromise. It is a planned action linked to a change of the security protocol by the reserve holders and involved technical solutions.