The Open Network (TON) is a decentralized layer-1 public chain network developed by the Telegram team. It was founded in 2018 by Telegram CEO Pavel Durov's brother Nikolai.
TON chain was originally named Telegram Open network and was developed by the Telegram team. The native token was originally named $GRAM. Telegram raised $1.7 billion through token sales in 2018, however, the ICO was later stopped by SEC and was deemed as an illegal securities offering. By the SEC ruling, Telegram returned all raised funds to investors and dropped the project in May 2020. The blockchain was then handed over to the community developers and rebranded as The Open Network, the native token was renamed as $TON.
According to the whitepaper, The Open Network (TON) is a fast, secure and scalable blockchain and network project, capable of handling millions of transactions per second if necessary, and both user-friendly and service provider-friendly. Aim for it to be able to host all reasonable applications currently proposed and conceived. One might think about TON as a huge distributed supercomputer, or rather a huge superserver, intended to host and provide a variety of services.
TON was the native token of The Open Network.
In June 2020, all of the available Toncoin tokens (98.55% of the total supply) became available for mining. The tokens were placed in special Giver smart contracts, allowing anyone to participate in the mining — up until 28 June 2022. Users mined around 200,000 TON daily. Now, the Toncoin PoW mining is over and the network was switched to a Proof of Stake chain.
New Toncoin is created as a reward to validators for their work. Every year, about 0.6% of the total supply is created. The TON ecosystem has nominators, a tool that allows stakers to lend tokens to validators for staking while sharing the income.
