When Telegram said goodbye to TON last year, I expressed the hope that future generations of developers would one day carry on with our vision of a mass-market blockchain platform.

So I was inspired to see the champions of Telegram's coding contests continue developing the open TON project, which they rebranded to Toncoin.

I'm proud that the technology we created is alive and evolving. When it comes to scalability and speed, TON is still years ahead of everything else in the blockchain realm. It would have been a shame to see this project not benefitting humanity.

Unlike the original TON, Toncoin is independent from Telegram. But I wish its team the same success. Coupled with the right go-to-market strategy, they have all they need to build something epic 💪

We’re pleased to note that Pavel Durov, founder and CEO of Telegram, recently posted in his channel in support of Toncoin.

For those who are unaware, Durov is a titan of tech, perhaps the single most influential leader of a technology company today. His unwavering dedication to privacy as a human right, and to excellent products, has made Telegram the most popular app of 2021, with over 500 million monthly active users.

Hundreds of millions around the world depend on Telegram as a safe and independent platform to communicate with loved ones and learn about the world around them, away from the eyes and dark pattern algorithms of big tech.

Pavel Durov and his brother, Nikolai, started to work on TON, a new type of decentralized permissionless blockchain that would meet the needs of Telegram, in 2018. And yet, due to circumstances beyond their control, they had to discontinue their work. In his post, Durov described the battle for decentralization as the “most important battle of our generation” and encouraged future generations to “fight the right battle,” the battle for “decentralization, balance and equality in the world.”

TON’s code was open-sourced. And dozens of talented engineers and enthusiasts took up Durov’s battle, continuing to work on TON and attempting to make the original design a reality. This community is our community: the TON community.

We’re thrilled that our hard work has been noticed and recognized by one of the most important people in independent technology today.

We are all part of this decentralization movement.

Toncoin’s market cap has been officially confirmed.

We’ve been patiently waiting, but the day has finally come. CoinMarketCap has officially confirmed Toncoin’s market capitalization and the amount in circulation.

According to CoinMarketCap’s calculations, the number of Toncoin tokens in circulation is 1.22 billion, and its market cap is over $4.6 billion at the time of writing.

Toncoin now sits in the 203rd place in CoinMarketCap’s crypto rankings, awaiting to enter the world's top 50 cryptocurrencies per market cap. We believe it is a matter of time.

Remember us asking readers to add Toncoin to “Favorites” on CoinMarketCap a while ago? Well, over 21,000 people follow Toncoin now. You can still help grow Toncoin’s recognition by adding it to your “Favorites” list.

​​TON and the Telegram Donate service have become official partners.

We’re excited to announce another partnership for the TON ecosystem — this time, with @donate, a Telegram-verified payments service built for Telegram.

With the help of Donate, channel owners can now have a stream of income without having to expose their readers and subscribers to paid ads.

The Donate bot helps content creators accept donations and create paid subscription channels.

What’s more, Donate has recently integrated Toncoin into its services, meaning Telegram users can make a donation or subscription payments in Toncoin.

This partnership is quite a breakthrough for the TON ecosystem.

Every month, thousands of content creators and hundreds of thousands of readers use the Donate bot.

With an ever-growing community, a sharp marketing squad and an experienced team of developers, the future looks bright for the @donate service.

We’ve been ecstatic about lots of TON news lately, but this partnership certainly has its merits. We’ve said it before, but we feel that this is the start of something special for Toncoin.

Season’s greetings and Merry Christmas.

​​TON’s ecosystem has a new mining pool — TON Coin Pool.

The pool has been live for less than two weeks, but in that time, its hash rate has managed to grow from 30 gigahashes per second to 4 terahashes per second of limited traffic, while the mining rewards increased from three to 30 solved algorithms in 24 hours.

The pool operates via an official miner and has amassed over 300 miners thus far.

The daily growth of the hash rate and the number of rewards have been increasing at a +100% pace.

The pool’s creators have optimized the OS, launched services for three popular mining OSs — Hive OS, RaveOS, and Minerstat mining OS — and continue to improve their servers, sites, and statistics.

The pool client’s source code is open-source.

As an aside, we’d like to mention that the pool’s creators reached out to the TON Foundation and have been working closely with the blockchain’s developers. Meanwhile, 25% of the pool’s income is invested in TON.

We’ll take this opportunity to extend a warm welcome to the TON Coin Pool team in joining the TON family.

TON Community Weekly Digest.

Here’s a roundup of the ecosystem’s most exciting news from the past seven days.

Updated network stats:

The number of new wallet addresses created on TON from Dec. 20 to 26 grew from 113,359 to 123,014 (+8.5%).

News:

— Telegram-verified payments service Donate and TON became official partners.
— Pavel Durov expressed his confidence in the TON project in a blog post. The translation of his message was last week’s most popular material. (His words of support even caught the attention of Cointelegraph.)
— CoinMarketCap published its initial results for Toncoin’s market capitalization.
— Read about the blazing speed at which TON Coin Pool is growing.
— Make sure you go over our rules on how to stay safe in the TON ecosystem.

Stay up-to-date with the latest developments brewing in the TON ecosystem by turning on the notifications to this channel.

Follow us on social media to help us get listed on the largest crypto exchanges.

Add Toncoin to your “Favorites” watchlist on CoinMarketCap and follow us on Twitter and YouTube.

Let’s show the crypto world that we have a growing, supportive and active community.

There’s a new way to trade Toncoin.

Today, we’re proud to introduce you to OTC Toncoin Market, a peer-to-peer platform in the TON ecosystem where users can trade Toncoin without the need for a crypto exchange.

How it works:

1. A user posts a swap of the crypto they want to trade.
2. A second user, who’s ready to buy Toncoin at the price set by the first user, contacts the service’s guarantor.
3. The guarantor provides transaction transparency and security. The two parties receive what they want, and the guarantor receives a small commission for their services.

Currently, Toncoin is available in the following trading pairs: BTC, ETH, USDT (ERC-20), USDC (ERC-20), and USDT (TRC-20).

Read this post to learn more about buying and selling Toncoin on OTC Toncoin Market.

The TON Foundation has verified the platform and added it to the TON Apps suite.

Please note that the minimum amount for a swap is $50,000.

💎 Ton Diamonds

🔥 Greetings everyone. A quite historic event is happening right now - the release of the first NFTs on the open network, the code of which was written by the Durov Brothers team.

A TON of diamonds are about to shine. These unique animated NFTs are the result of some really fine work.

✈️ About The Open Network project, gaining popularity now will be separate videos and articles from DeFis.

💎 TON Diamonds - these awesome crystals will be integrated as Avatars in wallets and will be visible during transactions in the blockchain. Now everyone can participate in the lottery and get one of them at random.

⚠️ To do this you need

✅ Login to the TON Diamonds Bot
✅ Subscribe to community channels
✅ If you want to increase your chances, call your friends.

😎 Who knows, maybe random will be on your side!

🔥 Links:

⚠️ TON Diamonds Site - https://ton.diamonds/

⚠️ NFT Bot - https://t.me/TonDiamondsDropBot

🌳 DeFis Portal Link Tree - https://linktr.ee/DeFis_Portal

#NFT #DeFis #TON #News

​​A holiday-season gift for miners.

Starting on Jan. 1, 2022, mining pools TonWhales and TON Coin Pool, verified and certified by the TON Foundation, will not be collecting commission from miner rewards.

TON mining pool participants have spearheaded this generous holiday initiative, which became a reality thanks to the TON Foundation grant program.

The program will run until April 2022, and TON will cover miners’ commissions using its reserves of funds. If miners show interest in the program and prefer it to other pools, it may be extended.

Representatives from TON’s core community of developers will be observing and following whether the pools will complete their requirements honestly and whether they will provide users mining work without any fees.

The TON Foundation sees significant risks for users who connect their computing power to mining pools that have no partnership with or are unverified by the TON Foundation. Users who participate in these foreign mining pools do so at their own risk and without the protection of the community.

More specifically, concerns center around hidden commission fees, unexpected and unsanctioned seizure of income, or using a pool’s computing power for nefarious reasons toward other participants of the ecosystem.

For these reasons, the TON Foundation has decided to help honest market participants by removing the automatic commission taken and shifting everyone’s attention to increasing users’ income and developing the ecosystem.

Please note: Currently, only two resources have received financing for the program.

Maintaining a mining pool is an expensive process that hardly anyone would want to do when financial incentives are removed from the equation.

If you’ve come across a mining pool unlisted in our TON Apps suite that offers low commission fees or even zero fees, tread lightly: Participating in these pools carries high risks. Do your own research and be safe.

​​A year in review.

2021 was nothing short of historic for the TON blockchain.

In the spring of this year, the TON team was simply a small cohort of developers and supporters who were maintaining and improving the network, which was created by Telegram in 2018.

The project had no community and was relatively unknown at the time.

In August, when Telegram relinquished the ton.org domain and source code to the TON Foundation, the TON blockchain received a second chance.

The TON community, whose genesis was this summer, has rapidly grown to become one of the most active crypto communities on the internet:

— Over 50,000 subscribers in the TON Community channel.
— Over 600,000 subscribers for all our TON social media accounts.
— Over 35,000 people have added Toncoin to their “Favorites” on CoinMarketCap.

The TON community comprises proactive people who closely follow the network’s developments and are active TON blockchain participants.

In six short months, the network has grown immensely:

— The number of wallets created on the network grew from 76,000 to 128,000 (60%).
— The number of daily active users grew from 220 to 10,600 (4,700%).
— The number of daily transactions on the network grew from 48,000 to 122,000 (150%).
— The number of network validators grew from 10 to 155, and their stake has increased from 6 million to 194 million Toncoin since January 2021.

The numbers speak for themselves: The TON blockchain has gained a lot of attention and grown at a record pace this year.

Meanwhile, TON and Toncoin’s developments have caught the attention of major media outlets, including Forbes, Cointelegraph, CoinDesk, among others.

This year, a notable moment came from none other than Pavel Durov, who expressed pride for the TON project and wished it all the best moving forward.

We also cannot forget the staggering success of Toncoin, whose value grew more than 30 times over the past 12 months.

Although Toncoin had little demand initially, it finally made its debut on some of the world’s largest centralized crypto exchanges for spot trading, such as FTX and OKEx.

While rubbing elbows with some of the most prominent cryptocurrencies in the world on centralized exchanges, Toncoin has also made appearances on decentralized exchanges, such as 1inch, Uniswap, PancakeSwap, among others.

The TON ecosystem has undergone so many changes and added so many services and products that it’s almost unrecognizable (in a good way).

Many talented teams of developers have joined the project and are actively improving the network, creating an environment conducive to healthy competition.

Thanks to them, the TON ecosystem has flourished into a robust milieu of mining pools, services, and applications, which are all located in the TON Apps suite.

This year has been a whirlwind, and we mean that in the best possible way. We’re setting the bar high for 2022 and hope that the network will continue to expand and that the TON Foundation will continue delivering high-quality services and updates.

Before signing off, we’d like to wish everyone a Happy New Year and extend a big thank you to everyone for all the support. This wouldn’t be possible without you!

Crypto exchange Hotbit has listed Toncoin.

Trading is available in the USDT/Toncoin (ERC-20) pair.

Follow the link to start trading.

Daily trading volume on Hotbit exceeds $170 million, and over 1 million people use the exchange every day.

Principles to stay safe in the crypto world.

We want to take this opportunity to remind you that among quality and reliable TON projects may lie scam services.

Here are a few examples of how they scam unsuspecting users:

1. They attract users and investors by promising lucrative returns and then quickly disappear with everyone’s money.
2. Hackers might exploit loopholes or weak coding in smart contracts, making off with millions of dollars.
3. Scammers can also steal people’s crypto simply by announcing an “exploit” or a fake hacking attack.

Always double-check website URLs and be safe when investing in new projects.

You can always read our steps to ensure safety when interacting with the TON blockchain and ecosystem, but be extra careful when using services and applications that are unlisted on ton.org or in the TON Apps suite.

We’re giving away $1,500,000 🎁

Thanks to you, we’ve reached 600,000 subscribers across all our TON community channels. Therefore, we’re excited to announce a crypto airdrop event: We’re giving away a total of $1,500,000 worth of Toncoin.

Each participant can earn 0.5 Toncoin.

🗓 From 2:00 pm Jan. 6 to 11:59 pm Jan. 13, Central European Time

Conditions:
1️⃣ Add Toncoin to “Favorites” on CoinMarketCap
2️⃣ Follow TON on Twitter and retweet this post
3️⃣ Create a Toncoin address with @wallet
4️⃣ Submit your entry to @Toncoin_eng_bot

You can find more details here: @Toncoin_eng_bot

👉🏽 Video instructions: YouTube, Telegram

$1,500,000 Giveaway video instructions 💎

​​Updates to TON’s roadmap.

Due to unprecedented growth in Q4, 2021, developers at the TON Foundation have had to update the project’s roadmap and reprioritize a few goals.

In Q4, 2021, the TON Foundation launched its decentralized subscription service, TON Subscriptions, and it managed to complete technical integrations with some of the world’s biggest crypto exchanges.

In Q1, 2022, the TON Foundation team is going to focus on developing the TON Developers Program, TON DeFi, and TON Nominators.

In Q2, 2022, users can expect TON DNS and TON Payments to launch.

In Q3, 2022, TON Proxy and TON Sites are expected.

And in Q4, 2022, TON Storage will launch.

Why the TON Foundation updated the roadmap:

The number of new developers joining the TON ecosystem has been growing exponentially — faster than the TON Foundation expected.

Third-party developers have been actively working on TON and creating new products; however, they’ve experienced a small snag due to little information and few instruments available.

Therefore, TON’s core team has decided to redirect the workflow and reprioritize specific projects.

First, the team is going to release the TON Developers Program. It will include additional documentation and learning materials and improve the API, SDK, and other tools developers use.

Second, at the beginning of 2022, the TON Foundation will concentrate many of its resources on developing TON DeFi — e.g., smart contracts for TON-native tokens, NFTs, and liquidity pools on the TON blockchain — since the community has shown immense interest in these services.

Finally, the TON Nominators service will be for both users and validators; therefore, its development is a top priority for the TON Foundation.

The updates to the roadmap were a necessary step to take from the team of developers.

However, the roadmap is now up-to-date and can better represent where the team is on its journey to finalizing the projects and services you’ve been waiting for.

@tonblockchain

​​TON Community weekly digest.

Here’s a roundup of the ecosystem’s most exciting news from the first week of 2022.

Network stats update:

The number of new accounts created on TON from Jan. 1 to 8 grew from 133,426 to 150,048 (+12.4%).

News:

— Our $1.5-million New Year airdrop event went live.
— TON’s roadmap underwent some changes.
— Developers from the TON Foundation published their own roundup of 2021.
— The Telegram Tonometer bot added the TON Business Cards function to its services.

Stay up-to-date with the latest developments brewing in the TON ecosystem by turning on the notifications to this channel. You won’t want to miss a thing!

Ladies and Gentlemen:

2022 is the year.

After four years of blood, sweat, tears, and active development from some of the most brilliant engineering talent on the globe, we're finally at the cusp of something great.

Something that has eluded all others, even as they reach untold heights, successes, and trillion dollar valuations.

Mass adoption.

The ability for each and every individual - no matter who they are, where they are from, or where they live - to lead an independent financial life, free from discrimination, encumbrance, and impediment.

Ubiquitous access to a fair and unprejudiced financial system is nothing less than wholesale transformation, a radical departure from the broken systems of past and present that have left so many behind.

Mass adoption opens a new, equitable path to all, not just the fortunate few.

Mass adoption is our mission.

And the vehicle for our mission is The Open Network. And 2022 is going to be the year we begin to see the fruits of our work.

It's going to be a great year, and we're so happy you're with us.

💣💣💣

Our New Year airdrop event is still open.

In case you’ve missed our announcement earlier, we’d like to extend a friendly reminder that there’s still time to participate in our New Year Toncoin airdrop event, which is giving away a total of $1.5 million. Each TON blockchain user can receive 0.5 Toncoin.

The event will now run until Jan. 13, and to learn more about the event’s conditions, you can read this post or visit @Toncoin_eng_bot.

We also have video instructions on YouTube and Telegram.

Russian rapper Morgenshtern gives a shout-out to TON.

The most popular rap artist in Russia, Morgenshtern praised the TON blockchain project on Instagram in a post to his 7.9 million followers, expressing the amount of trust he has for the team of developers and saying that he would be taking on an essential role in the network’s development and growth.

The rapper posted an Instagram Stories in which he announced he had bought $139,000 worth of Toncoin, which jumped 8% from $3.5 to $3.8 at the time of writing, by showing his followers a screenshot of his Tonkeeper wallet.

We’re ecstatic to see Morgenshtern, who has collaborated with Lil Pump and has become a household name in Russia, spread the good word of the TON project and Toncoin to a broad audience.