Foresight Ventures: How did the TON chain become popular again? What is the relationship between Unibot and TON chain?

Original author: Maggie@Foresight Ventures

Since July this year, the popularity of Unibot has led to a wave of Telegram “Crypto Bots” craze. Coupled with the launch of Telegram Wallet on Token 2049, the TON chain has returned to the public’s attention.This article will take you through the beginning and end of this incident and look for opportunities for TON ecological entrepreneurship/investment.

1. Distinguish between Telegram, Crypto Bots and TON blockchain products.

2. Learn how the TON chain became popular again?

3. What is the ecological status of the TON chain? What are the entrepreneurial/investment opportunities in the TON ecosystem?

TL;DR

• Telegram is an instant messaging software with over 800 million active users and has great support for the TON chain. The application form of TON Dapp Bots on Telegram (Telegram bots are similar to WeChat mini programs) has great potential.。

• Technically, the TON chain was originally designed to carry Telegram’s huge user base. The main design principles areHigh performance, capable of supporting millions of TPS。The development of contracts on the TON chain is different from other chains in many ways, and there are certain development difficulties.。

• Ecologically,The ecology on the TON chain is still in the early stages of development and has great potential. Among them, the large payment field may be the advantage area of ​​the TON chain.

1. Distinguishing concepts: Telegram, “crypto bots” (Unibot), TON chain

First, we need to distinguish between these different products.

Telegram

• Telegram is the fourth largest instant messaging software in the world. The number of monthly active users worldwide has exceeded 800 million, and almost everyone in the Crypto field is using it.

• In addition to instant messaging, product features have also been added, including Stories, Wallet, Mini-bots, etc. Just like WeChat can not only chat, but also have Moments, WeChat payment, and WeChat mini programs.

“Crypto bots”

• Telegram bots are small applications that run within Telegram, similar to WeChat mini programs.The “crypto bots” we are talking about are Crypto Dapps such as Uniswap made into Telegram bots, which can be easily used in Telegram.。

TON chain

• TON chain is a project established in 2018High performance public chain。

• The wallet of the TON chain has a first-level entrance Wallet on Telegram,It is connected to TON and BTC and can display the balance of USDT on Tron.

• There is one in the TON walletTON Space is a non-custodial wallet, and the backend is only connected to the TON chain.

• There is an Apps Center on Telegram, where Web3 Dapp is placed, which is the same as the WeChat applet.Most of them are applications on the TON chain. It may be moved to Wallet/TON Space in the future.

Talking to this point,What is the relationship between Unibot and TON chain?Everyone must be aware of this issue.

The answer is:It doesnt matter. Crypto bots like Unibot are bots on Telegram (equivalent to “WeChat mini programs”).Unibot allows users to exchange tokens in Telegram. Its backend is connected to the Uniswap protocol on the Ethereum chain. Note that it is connected to the Ethereum chain and not the TON chain. Therefore, Unibot has nothing to do with the TON chain。

2. The development history of TON chain

• The development history of TON

Simply put, the development process of TON chain can be divided into 3 stages:

• Before 2021: Sued, abandoned, project stalled for a time.

- In 2018, the Telegram team began exploring blockchain solutions for Telegram and designed the TON blockchain.

- In the first quarter of 2020, Telegram was sued by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and was fined US$18.5 million and returned US$1.2 billion to investors. Telegram gave up on TON and stopped the development of TON.

• 2021 ~ 2022: Listed on the exchange in the fourth quarter of 2021, and begin to launch some Side Features and infrastructure, such as cross-chain bridges, storage services, DNS, etc.

- In 2021, NewTON, a small team of open source developers, restarted development of the TON blockchain. NewTON also changed its name to the TON Foundation in 2021.

- TON on-chain exchange in the fourth quarter of 2021.

- From 2021 to 2022, Side Features and infrastructure such as TON DNS, TON storage, and cross-chain bridges were developed. Note: Side Feature is not an official term, but we are willing to refer to features other than the main functions of the blockchain as Side Feature.

• 2023: Telegram Bots such as Unibot and Bananagun become popular, TON wallets are added to Telegram, and the value of TON is re-emphasized. TON becomes popular. The currency price rises from 1.2 to 2.2 in two months, and the market value rises to the top 10.

- Before Token 2049 held in August, many people had doubts about the relationship between the TON Foundation and Telegram. Until Telegram launched the crypto wallet during the Token 2049 event in Singapore, the crypto wallet was developed on the Open Network (TON) blockchain and is now available to Telegram’s 800 million users worldwide.After the TON wallet was integrated into Telegram, the price of Toncoin soared and its market capitalization rose to the top 10.

    - The TON chain wallet has a first-level entrance on Telegram,Equivalent to WeChat Pay.

    - Dapps on the TON chain have better exposure on Telegram. Since they can use non-custodial wallets, their assets are more secure.

3. TON chain technology

From the beginning of the design, the TON chain hopes to carry Telegrams huge user base, so the first design principle ishigh performance.

• High performance: supports millions of TPS (sharding function needs to be turned on). In order to achieve high performance, TON chain has made the following technical selections in terms of chain structure, consensus algorithm, etc.

    - Chain structure: multi-chain architecture, unlimited sharding. TON has a main chain that can accommodate up to 2 to the power of 32 work chains, and each work chain can be subdivided into up to 2 to the power of 60 shard chains.After the sharding function is turned on, including the sharded TPS, it is claimed that TON can support millions of TPS.

    - Consensus algorithm: using POS consensus algorithm. Nodes pledge to become verifiers. Verifiers will be assigned to the main chain and different shard chains, and run the BFT consensus algorithm to reach consensus on the blocks within an epoch. Many high-performance blockchains use POS+BFT consensus. algorithm design.TON’s consensus algorithm can be said to be a variant of the BFT algorithm. The BFT algorithm is deterministic and efficient., the only problem is that it cannot support a large number of verifiers. TON uses a deterministic pseudo-random method to group verifiers to serve the main chain and each shard chain.

    - Message routing between shard chains: Hypercube instant routing reduces the latency of message routing between shard chains. TON is a multi-chain tightly coupled design. The global chain (the main chain is the global chain by default) can directly send any message to an account. Messages sent by other chains can only be relayed through the shared chain according to the routing. According to the sharding of the system The network conditions of the chain allocate appropriate shared chains for relaying messages. The entire shard chain network forms a hypercube network. For a shard chain hypercube network with a size of N, the number of routes that need to be passed is hop = log 16(N). Therefore, only 4 routing nodes are needed to support a million-level shard chain (for larger scales, 5- and 6-dimensional cubes can be used to reduce routing nodes).

    - Smart contract asynchronous call：Facilitates parallel execution of transactions. The design of asynchronous calls is more convenient for parallel execution of transactions, but it does not have the atomicity of a synchronous architecture like EVM. If you make 3 calls to a contract in a row and only the last one fails, you may need to do it manually if you need to roll back changes left or right.

• Smart contract virtual machine: TVM.

- TVM is a non-EVM virtual machine, and you need to use FunC or TACT language to develop TON smart contracts. This means that the EVM project cannot simply be moved to the TON chain.

- The calls to smart contracts on TON are asynchronous calls. This also requires developers to adapt.

• Side Feature: Features other than the main functions of the blockchain.

- TON Storage: A decentralized file storage system that can store files for users.

- TON DNS: Assign human-readable names to accounts, smart contracts, services, and nodes.

- TON Pay: A small payment channel that can realize instant off-chain transactions.

- TON Proxy: The network proxy anonymous service of the TON network is used to hide the IP address of the TON node and protect user privacy.

Technical problems that need to be solved

• Side Feature needs to improve development speed.The basic development of core functions has been completed long ago, but some functions have not been enabled. The development progress of Side Features is slow and there are not many users yet.

• Process proposals faster, increase documentation. The TON Foundation is also working hard to solve the problem of few documents and reduce the difficulty for developers.

4. TON chain ecology

There are various Dapps such as DeFi and GameFi on the TON chain, but the TVL displayed on Defillama is only 10 million (October 7, 2023). You will know if this number is high or not by comparing it.

• Solana: Market cap $8.0B, ranked 9th, TVL shown on Defillama is $328.4m.

• TON: Market cap $7.6B, ranked 10th, TVL is $10.93m.

• TRON: Market capitalization $7.4B, ranked 11th, TVL is $5.57B.

Clearly, as of October 7, 2023,TON has a market capitalization of $7.6 B, ranking among the top 10, but its TVL is far less than Solana and TRON, which are ranked before and after it. The ecology of the TON chain can be said to be very early and has great potential.

From a technical perspective, to flourish the TON ecosystem, we also need to reduce the difficulty of Dapp development and add more infrastructure.

Reduce the difficulty of Dapp development

• There needs to be more adequate documentation, more development tools, and education for Dapp developers.TONs smart contracts mainly use the FunC language, which means that Solidity contracts cannot be translated to the TON chain. FunC is difficult and has few developers. Therefore, the TACT language later launched by TON reduced development difficulty, and the TACT compiler can compile TACT into FunC. Although the TACT language is designed to be simple, it still has a considerable learning cost. There is a need for more adequate documentation, tools and education.

• There needs to be more contract templates.Currently, there are few smart contract templates on TON, and some existing Token contracts are well designed but difficult to modify.

• Better contract debugging tools and reduced audit difficulties.After developers use the TACT language to develop, it will be compiled into a FunC contract. Sometimes developers do not know whether the compiled FunC contract is correct. Therefore, when developers debug contracts, they often not only adjust the TACT language, but also directly adjust the FunC contract. Therefore, we hope that better contract debugging tools can help developers easily debug smart contracts, at least so that developers do not have to debug the FunC contract. In addition, there are few contract audit cases and the audit is slow. There are also many contract audit companies who are new to TACT and FunC.

Supplementary infrastructure

• Expanded support for cross-chain bridges.The official bridge supports TON/ETH and BSC. Some other bridges also support Polygon and some chains with smaller market capitalization.

• Introducing Oracle.DeFi, especially lending protocols, require Oracle, and there is currently no Oracle available on the TON mainnet. It is said that Oracle is already running on the test network.

5. Outlook of TON chain ecology

We can compare the Crypto bots on the TON chain with the bots on the non-TON chain.The TON chain has great advantages over Telegram.

In this case,What are the entrepreneurial/investment opportunities in the TON ecosystem?

• The large payment field is the area where the TON chain has the most advantages and has a lot of room.Compared with some encryption ecosystems that focus on pure Web3 projects, the TON chain has a powerful entrance through Telegram, and more projects that are integrated with the real world will also usher in, such as payment transfers, life services, financial management, etc. in WeChat Pay. This is where the TON chain has an advantage over other chains, and there is a lot of room for it.

• Web3 infrastructure.We mentioned that the technical facilities of the TON ecosystem (such as bridges, Oracles, etc.) still need to be improved. The infrastructure on ETH is already very large, but the infrastructure of the TON ecosystem still needs to be improved.

• Games and social projects.Gaming and social Telegram bots may be the most popular projects in the TON ecosystem in the future.

- With the powerful entrance of Telegram, TON chain games can more convenientlyReach people on Telegram。

- Users do not need to download the client or complicated registration procedures,You can use it “out of the box” on Telegram to reduce the cost of users’ game experience。

- At the same time, rely on TelegramSocial + gaming can take advantage of peoples inner comparison psychology, especially their preference to compare with people they are familiar with, to promote the spread of applications.

- TON small game projects, especially those designedIt is easily addictive, has a short development cycle, and can be launched faster. It may be the first project to become popular.

• DeFi projects.DeFi projects are definitely an extremely important and profitable project, but they may develop slowly. Not only because the infrastructure that DeFi projects rely on still takes time to build, more projects need to issue tokens on TON. Also because a large amount of DeFi is on ETH, it is difficult to absorb it all at once.

6. Summary

• Telegram is an instant messaging software with over 800 million active users and has great support for the TON chain. The application form of TON Dapp Bots on Telegram (Telegram bots are similar to WeChat mini programs) has great potential.

- Telegram bots (similar to WeChat mini-programs) have the characteristics of no need to download, instant use, smooth experience, and the ability to interact with Telegram friends. Making Dapp into Telegram bots can make it easier to reach Web2 users. The success of WeChat mini programs also gives us great expectations for the success of Telegram bots.

- Advantages of TON on Telegram: Telegram has added a Wallet first-level entrance to connect to the TON chain, a more secure non-custodial wallet TON Space, applications have better exposure in the Telegram Apps Center, and Telegram Ads can be used by TON ecological projects .

• Technically, the TON chain was originally designed to host Telegrams huge user base. The main design principle is high performance and can support millions of TPS. The development of contracts on the TON chain is different from other chains in many ways, and there are certain development difficulties.

- To develop smart contracts on the TON chain, users need to learn TACT and FunC languages, and adapt to features such as asynchronous calling of contracts.

- To flourish the TON ecosystem, it is necessary to reduce the difficulty of contract development and supplement the infrastructure on the TON chain.

• Ecologically, the ecology on the TON chain is still in the early stages of development and has great potential. Among them, the large payment field may be the advantageous area of ​​the TON chain.

- Large payment areas include transfer payments, life services, financial management, etc. on Telegram, which may be the area where the TON chain has the most advantages.

- There is still room for improvement in the infrastructure on TON.

- Gaming and social projects are likely to be the first to become popular.

- DeFi projects may develop relatively slowly. A large amount of DeFi is on ETH, which makes it difficult to absorb it all at once.

Finally, if you have a good TON ecosystem project and an excellent idea and need resources to put it into practice, please do not hesitate to contact us at Foresight Ventures and Foresight X. We support your entrepreneurial journey and, with our deep industry knowledge and extensive resources, we will ensure your project thrives.

Thanks to Chelsea, Vivi, and Jerry for proofreading and annotating content.

About Foresight Ventures

Foresight Ventures is betting on the innovation process of cryptocurrency in the next few decades. It manages multiple funds: VC funds, secondary active management funds, multi-strategy FOF, and special purpose S fund Foresight Secondary Fund l. The total asset management scale exceeds 4 One hundred million U.S. dollars. Foresight Ventures adheres to the concept of Unique, Independent, Aggressive, Long-term and provides extensive support for projects through strong ecological power. Its team comes from senior people from top financial and technology companies including Sequoia China, CICC, Google, Bitmain and other top financial and technology companies.