TonicAsk: TVM DevWe asked several questions a TVM developer known as Purple. He contributed to the minter contract modifications we wrote about yesterday, and has a wider field of view at TON dev community.

How come you're a TVM developer? Did you work with other blockchains before laying your finger on TON?I met Roman (founder of @bitoneng) in a chat and he offered me a job. At the time, I didn't even know what smart contracts were. It took me about a month to learn Fift & FunC. Of course, I had C++/C development experience before that.

How did you react when first saw the release version of jetton smart contract? Did you like its functionality and the way it was written?There was a lot of misunderstanding why it works that way, but still it's the best way to implement it because of blockchain features. Still not clear why they just took metadata from NFT. My colleague and I even opened an issue (https://github.com/ton-blockchain/TIPs/issues/79) about it.

You worked on the BITON's recent minter contract improvements. In short, why did you decide to rework it and what has been done?There was an ICO minter in the TF repository. But there were trivially no constraints and no output capability there. We refactored the code and added the functions we needed. The code also became prettier. We added comments into the code.

Fift or FunC?FunC.

Do you find TON a comfortable dev environment as of today?I believe that the entry threshold into development is now very high, there are very few good guides. TVM developers can be counted on the fingers of one hand, all of whom are already members of some kind of a team. This generates a high demand for them.

Make Jetton GreatTeams start playing around with the jetton minter contract. Dropped by the core devs earlier this month, some folks decided to customize it a bit.

For example, the @bitoneng team introduced a series of improvements to the source code (made available on GitHub). Among these:

- the STR (send to receive) mechanism that enables users to simply send $TON and receive jettons in return instantly;
- withdraw $TON any time from the minter contract;
- limit ICO time / max. token amount;
- adding Fift scripts;
- code refactoring.

The repository is not production ready yet, but the devs are welcome to examine the lines.

The Arrival of JettonsMultiple projects are up for launching their custom tokens on TON – the jettons. It's not an easy task due to the lack of infrastructure around, but TON builders keep proving nothing is impossible.

Scaleton is a TON wallet with a focus on jettons. This newly-born product has already become the stronghold of some devs working with jetton smart contracts: it's fairly easy to add your jetton to the wallet on the mainnet, plus there's a handy testnet version of Scaleton.

In addition, the founder open-sourced Scaleton to GitHub just yesterday – making it the first open-source wallet of the TON ecosystem. You're welcome to try @scaleton or contribute with a few lines of TypeScript.

Jettons Ahead of WalletsDespite the fact jettons are already possible to implement, it's not been an easy task due to the lack of infrastructure: one can deploy a jetton contract and send it, yet the receivers have no way to see their jetton balances nor send it out (unless you're a dev).

However, the TON community always finds a way. Recently, the first jetton found its way to the mainnet. More to that, the issuing project even holds an active token sale in public.

On its front-end, the sale is implemented in the following way: in order to receive jettons, one must send Toncoin to the ICO address. Afterward, the jettons are automatically sent in return – the amount depends on how much $TON has been received.

In order to check your jetton balance – since there are no wallets that support jettons yet – creators implemented a simple on-site solution: on top of the homepage of the ICO website, participants can insert their Toncoin sender address, hit 'check', and view their token balance instantly.

To make sure you're getting actual on-chain jettons, the founders open sourced their jetton smart contract on GitHub.

TON vs AlternativesL1 blockchains existed long before TON stepped into the market. Even though they're less relevant today in terms of functionality and capabilities, many devs keep building on top of Solana or Ethereum, for example.

Original TON designers took into account the fact there are other chains that are not easy to compete with. And did their best to architect The Open Network (back then thought of as 'Telegram Open Network').

The recently published doc titled 'Comparison of TON, Solana, and Ethereum 2.0' explains ups and downs of each network in comparison to TON. You can read the PDF on ton.org or in attachment – it will be useful for devs struggling with what blockchain to choose from, as well as for entrepreneurs and investors to get the prospects of L1s.

1 Billion USDTwo weeks ago, channel of TON posted an address for community donations – with an idea to create a bigger reserve of Toncoin. It would enable Foundation to develop the ecosystem harder, and reach new heights.

Starting next day, the donations address exploded with incoming transactions. It reached hundreds of millions USD in $TON equivalent – all being non-profit donations. Today the amount of Toncoin donated surpassed 1 Billion USD equivalent (500M+ $TON) – making it the biggest crypto raise period.

There are still not many details how these cosmic amounts will be put to work. One thing is clear: potential of TON is still hard to digest, even for ourselves.

TonicAsk: BITONNFTs have long been the hottest topic in TON space. Devs had to think hard when working with smart contracts – for the sake of creating awesome products we seen on the shelves of TON Apps today.

In Q1 alone, BITON developed one of a few functional TON NFT marketplaces, built an involved community with 15K subscribers on its channel in Russian, and started the game in other TON directions. Today BITON's CEO also answered the next 5 questions of TonicAsk.

Q: BITON seems to be more than just an NFT marketplace. Could you shortly explain the paradigm of products you're building?

A: Our main goal is to create an ecosystem of products around NFT. To date, we have the largest set of products in TON and we are going to integrate our NFT and BITON tokens into every corner or our BITON universe.

Q: What's the development status of these things? When can we expect it to launch?

A: biton.pw marketplace is at the pre-release stage, DEX is at the stage of testing and refining. Launch of most important products planned on Q2.

Q: You're running quite a large team of devs. It's probably the biggest dev company on TON (do you think it is?). —How is the experience?

A: Our team of developers will soon expand greatly due to merging with another project (a little inside) ?. We are not going to stop here and will attract new devs into out ecosystem.

Q: BITON's bot is a vital part of infrastructure. Do you like the idea TON products becoming more dependent on Telegram? +Do you see potential in web bots enabling GUI?

A: We believe that the integration of TON into Telegram via bots is the priority for the advancement of TON+Telegram. I believe that GUI integration into bots will change their significance radically: now with the help of bots, you can build not just primitive, but also complex structures and products.

Q: You're currently hiring – what kind of devs TON environment lacks?

A: BITON Dev Program has been launched successfully, but has not been announced yet. We are willing to cooperate with any TON devs who share same interest in building exciting things on TON.

Telegram Web AppsIn the latest Telegram update that was published under an hour ago, the team announced web bots as 'Web Apps for Bots' – among with web app design guidelines, implementation instructions, as well as other useful notes.

Worth taking a look at: https://core.telegram.org/bots/webapps

The concept was titled 'Bot Revolution' and we already know a few TON teams that kick off with active development in this direction right now.

TonicAsk: TelePayWe're launching a new format called TonicAsk. In order to shed lights on recent on-TON developments, our writers will reach out to various projects within Tonic community. With exactly 5 questions to answer, teams will have an opportunity to tell about amazing things they've built – to the worldwide audience of Tonic devs.

Let's begin with @telepaycash – the first Toncoin payment gateway. TelePay is a recently released platform to accept payments with TON – featuring advanced functionality and a quality approach to design...

Q: Could you tell a bit about your history as a dev, where are you from, and how did you come up with an idea of building a payment gateway on TON?

A: My name is Carlos Lugones, born in Cuba, I'm graduated from Computer Sciences Engineering in 2018, but started programming at the age of 12 years. Currently, I'm 27 years old, so I've been more than half of my life programming.

Last 3+ years, I've been building startups from a podcasting platform, to marketplaces, online education, VPNs and fintech also. Some of those startups were successful, others were shutdown due to many reasons.

Q: You have many cool things ahead. How are you planning to stick to the roadmap? Will you hire more devs?

A: Definitively it's in our plans to hire more devs and grow our team. As minimal viable product, we're just validating an idea in the market, to see if people indeed need something like TelePay, in just one way, we can say there is space for the product in the market, and we can solve some issues to handle payments.

Q: How easy it is to integrate TelePay into a web shop, for example? Is there WordPress plugin en route?

A: About integrating TelePay with existing marketplaces or CMSs, we already have a dev right now building the Wordpress plugin, then we'll do the same for Shopify, OpenCart and other major web platforms. Also, our external devs community is building the PHP, Dart and Node libraries.

Q: Do you think Telegram bots (web bots in particular) could be the next big thing for merchants? Why use crypto when you can pay with Google Pay, for example?

A: We absolutely love Telegram bots and will be releasing the full, integrated payments experience inside Telegram. Web bots are a new field and we have to explore it deeply.

Why use crypto when you can pay with Google Pay? Well, cryptocurrencies = freedom. There will always be people preferring freedom, decentralization and control over their payments. And I think that crypto and fiat world could perfectly coexist, even tough both worlds are mixing each day more. Banks, companies and governments are investing more into the crypto world, and there is no coming back.

Q: What advice would you give to the Tonic builder community?

A: For the TONIC devs community, I'd recommend more events, meet each other, share information and develop the missing parts in the ecosystem. Start thinking more as a global community and share common goals to make TON better and easier. Count with me to whatever I could do and with TelePay to help improve they payments experience.