The Open Network

The Open Network (TON), initiated by Telegram, has evolved through several pivotal milestones with long-term significance.

In 2019, the native token was officially renamed from TON to Gram, establishing a distinct identity for the network's economic layer while the blockchain retained its name, laying the foundation for its future ecosystem.

A major technical breakthrough came with the completion of the 'second-level confirmation' upgrade, reducing block finality time to under one second—significantly ahead of mainstream L1 chains. This achievement, driven by the Catchain 2.0 consensus mechanism, enabled near-instant transactions and positioned TON as a high-performance infrastructure capable of supporting large-scale applications.

The launch of Acton, a unified smart contract toolchain, marked another critical step. By improving development efficiency by 10 times, it lowered the barrier for developers and accelerated the migration of decentralized applications to the network, strengthening its ecosystem depth.

The $71 million financing round led by AlphaTON Capital, which acquired a substantial batch of TON tokens, demonstrated institutional confidence in the network's long-term value proposition and provided capital for further infrastructure development.

From a technical architecture perspective, TON's dynamic sharding mechanism—which automatically splits and merges shardchains based on network load—ensures unlimited scalability. Combined with its Proof-of-Stake validator system and the ability to handle over 100,000 transactions per second in public tests, TON has established itself as one of the few Layer-1 blockchains capable of mass adoption. These milestones collectively represent not just incremental improvements, but foundational steps toward TON's vision of becoming the default blockchain for Telegram's 900 million users.