👛 Let’s meet a TON Foundation member — Alec Korba

TON Society is releasing a series on members of the Ton Foundation. The first one is Alec Korba, a historian, futurist, expert on crypto, decentralization, WEB3, and a pro on global technological partnerships, strategic alliances and business development.

A quick Q&A summary with Alec:

When did you join the TON Foundation, and what are your roles and responsibilities?

➡️ I joined TF in December 2022 and am responsible for creating The Open Challenge – an open grant program that relies on performance indicators. I also manage strategic infrastructure partnerships.

What features of TON impressed you the most?

➡️ TON is a unique project because it is funded collectively, and not by venture companies. Unlike most modern blockchains I've seen, it has an active, cooperative community with huge growth opportunities.

I have been working with L1 grants for a long time, and seeing how the industry has developed, I realized how inefficient this model is. Project founders spend a lot of time applying for grants and rarely receive the expected capital.

We are developing a way to make our grant figures public, so anyone can register and achieve the key indicators necessary to obtain funding.

These grants ought to be based on metrics that can be tracked.

Financing should always be diversified. A founder needs to bring together strategic partnerships, equity investors, consultants, and communities.

Here are the most important steps: secure operational funding, invest in your community, focus on communication, find the right consultants and build a relationship with the foundation.

Giving back to the community is important because it strengthens your position. That includes sharing some of the things you create as open source.

Yours truly, @DeepTonEng is eager to find out more.

🔃 GAGARIN is joining the TON ecosystem

GAGARIN is a project by RSquad, a blockchain lab that develops inter-network solutions at TON. The team is known for delivering on its promises. At the end of last year, it launched a lite TON client that enables compatibility with EVM-based blockchains. Trustless Bridge is another product that was praised by members of the community.

🔵What is the GAGARIN project

Although there are already crowdfunding platforms on TON, such as Tonstarter and Startup Market, GAGARIN’s launchpad is about to become a worthy competitor. Aside from having the basic mechanics of a launchpad, the project brings additional value in the form of tier levels.

Tiers are a ranking system where users are grouped by the number of locked tokens they own. This then defines how many they will receive at the time of allocation.

There are several ways to gain Allocation Power:
🔍 Staking GGR tokens in official GAGARIN pools
🔍 Investing in GAGARIN private rounds
🔍 Providing liquidity for GAGARIN coin pairs, such as GGR/BNB

🔵 The Ambassadors Program

GAGARIN launched the Ambassadors Program, open to anyone of its 80,000 community members. Just in the last few days, more than 170 people have applied.

You may be wondering: why so many? Here’s why: ambassadors will receive a unique NFT and the opportunity to participate in the GAGARIN IDO (Initial DEX Offering) and earn additional income. Two types of NFT have been released: rare ($475) and epic ($1,900).

Check out the details here on how to participate.

The devs have completed integration with TON in mid-January, so now startups can raise funds to launch their projects. There, for instance, you can find the IDO of a project called NFTPaintings. It’s a platform created by a startup for buying artwork with cryptocurrency and it offers unique opportunities for investing in art.

So, here is the opportunity to participate in the listing of GAGARIN and find out about the unique perks of this crowdfunding platform.

Yours truly, @DeepTonEng

💎 OpenMask supports Connect 2.0

It looks like OpenMask will soon be able to compete with the best TON wallets, such as Tonkeeper, TonHub, and MyTonWallet. We're seeing that the app is developing quickly and smoothly, and it has also implemented a range of functions for helping developers.

It's not the first time that the success of this non-custodial wallet has drawn our attention. More news today - OpenMask, similar to Metamask, now supports Connect 2.0, the official protocol that enables communication between wallets and applications in the TON ecosystem. This means that the wallet is able to integrate most decentralized applications.

The following may be useful for developers:
🔽Documentation by Ton Connect with practical instructions
🔽List of supported wallets
🔽Demo applications

Yours truly, @DeepTonEng

👛 CryptoBot will block accounts for committing illegal acts

As per @CryptoBot, the app will no longer allow its use to carry out illegal transactions or receive coins from suspicious sources.

The news bot reminded that several large P2P trading platforms have gone out of business for this reason.

Committing fraudulent actions, laundering cryptocurrencies from black markets, and any other illegal activity will certainly lead to the accounts being permanently banned. Any persons who violate these rules will be refused our services, stressed the app administrators.

Yours truly, @DeepTonEng

🌐 TON Meetup in Hyderabad

Great news! On January 28th, TON and the software company PurpleTalk India Pvt Ltd will organize the first WEB3 conference in Hyderabad for developers and enthusiasts.

TON representatives will talk about the basics and advantages of The Open Network over other decentralized networks and the future integration of the blockchain ecosystem with Telegram.

Yours truly, @DeepTonEng

👛 TON's proposal to optimize tokenomics

Background:
Since the launch of The Open Network blockchain, numerous concerns were raised by the community about the clarity and transparency of its tokenomics. The main one was about the inactive wallets of miners early on in the project. It is unknown who they belong to and when would they become active again, if at all.

Such uncertainty hindered the planning and development of the network's tokenomics and ecosystem growth.

💎 On December 17, in response to many requests, the community called on all early miners to activate their inactive mining wallets by the end of 2022. However, 194 of the 204 genesis wallets identified by the community remain inactive to date, with 1,081,425,847 Toncoin locked in.

These wallets have never been activated and have never made a single outgoing transfer. It is widely assumed that access to these inactive wallets has been lost.

💎 Toncoin is a utility token needed primarily for calculating and paying for network gas used in decentralized services in TON.

Proposal:
"Because TON is a community-driven blockchain, we believe that network validators should heed the voice of the community."

We therefore invite validators to vote for a proposal to optimize tokenomics, which includes locking inactive mining wallets for a certain period of time.

Even though some suggested deactivating them permanently, most community members are in favor of maintaining the principle of decentralization, the very idea that makes us a single entity. Thus, a consensus was reached: to set the lock period to 48 months.

This will give the TON ecosystem time to evolve while providing flexibility for those who have not been made aware of such discussions in the community.

Like any other network proposal, at least 75% of validators' votes in two consecutive rounds will be required for it to take effect.

Owners of inactive mining wallets can opt out by activating them at any time before the vote, which will begin on February 21, 2023. The full list of inactive mining wallets can be found here: https://tontech.io/stats/early-miners.

We are proud about TON being a unique decentralized blockchain community. Our mission of decentralization is made possible with the active participation of the community that we have today.

Please feel welcome to discuss and express your opinion on this proposal."

💎 @DeepTonEng also invites you, the reader, to share your opinion on this matter.

⚡️Just in:

The number of addresses registered in the TON blockchain has reached 2,000,000!
That’s doubled since July 18, 2022.

🍔 Reasons for freezing tokens

Dear friends, whatever you say about Ton Community's proposal to freeze genesis wallets for four years, it is not a rare case in crypto. CEX, services, and even the blockchains are all doing it.

Here are some of the main reasons:

🔽 Per the request of regulators, i.e. digital confiscation. This is done by court order when an investigation has been concluded, much like freezing a bank account. An example is the freezing of assets on the FTX exchange. Also, two years ago, the assets of @Chatex_bot on the Everscale blockchain were frozen for the same reason.

🔽After a security breach, to prevent hackers from withdrawing users' coins.

🔽After the detection of illegal activity in a smart contract. For example, an attacker uses inflationary error to mint and withdraw tokens to his address. That happened when the Tether network (USDT) froze 704 smart contracts on three addresses worth $150 million. Another case is Acala, who froze 16 wallets worth $3 billion Australian dollars. The reason is that an exploit was used by liquidity providers of aUSD to mint unsecured aUSD.

🔽Smart contracts related to criminal activity in external DeFi applications can also be frozen. That happened when Circle, the issuer of USDC, froze several Ethereum addresses due to their interaction with the decentralized application Tornado Cash.

🔽Staking is the most benevolent form of funds being frozen in a wallet or exchange platform. This helps support the network, and in return, users receive rewards.

Note that most Layer 1 blockchains, such as XRP and Stellar, have the freeze functionality built into their token contracts. Networks allow developers to issue tokens with a global freeze function, using which the issuer can completely freeze the transfer of tokens.

Coming up @DeepTonEng we will talk about the benefits of freezing inactive wallets on the TON network. Let us know what you think.

✈️ Telegram traffic in Russia is growing. The messenger has overtaken its competitor WhatsApp by the amount of data transmitted and is about to catch up by the number of users.

🎙 Megaton Finance will be launched on January 30, 2023

Remember that Megaton Finance is a new DEX AMM from Ozys, a TON partner.

Here are some of the currency pools that will be available on the day of the launch:

1️⃣ WTON/oETH
2️⃣ WTON/oUSDT
3️⃣ WTON/oUSDC
4️⃣ WTON/oMATIC
5️⃣ WTON/oORC
6️⃣ WTON/oWBTC
7️⃣ WTON/oKLAY
8️⃣ oUSDC/oETH
9️⃣ oUSDC/oOrbs
🔟oUSDC/oUSDT

Yours truly, @DeepTonEng

🍔 GAGARIN has completed its integration with TON

GAGARIN Launchpad is now fully integrated with TON, thanks to the work carried out by blockchain lab RSquad. Now projects in this ecosystem will be able to conduct their IDO (Initial DEX Offering).

❓ GAGARIN’s edge over other launchpads:

🔽Users can create a personal account on GAGARIN and participate in any IDOs for network tokens.

🔽The launchpad gives TON projects a “boost” through IDOs, while the launchpad team supports projects along the way.

🔽Almost any project can launch its IDO by locking in GGR coins at start. Locked tokens are a kind of guarantee against project fraud. It promotes investor confidence, attracts trustworthy projects and increases the token's utility.

A significant milestone for GAGARIN will be the launch of its token on the TON network. It will be listed on STON.fi on January 31. After that date, holders of GGR will be offered a staking program.

Yours truly, @DeepTonEng

🔵 New features on tonscan.org

Jettons transactions are now displayed in history. It is also possible to see the top Jettons holders.

Here is an example.

🌐 TON Society has more grant updates

Getting grants for TON used to be complicated. Not that they were impossible to get or wrongly assigned. The whole experience felt stingy and not adequate for the tasks at hand. As a result, teams had to spend significant time looking for additional funding instead of developing and preparing their product for launch. That’s inefficient and inevitably affected rollout time.
Last year, representatives of various TON projects discussed this problem at the Dubai conference. And they have made, in our opinion, a bold decision: to completely change our concept of grants. Now The Open Challenge is being directed by Alek Korba, a high-class expert in partnerships, alliances, and business development. Soon, it will be up to the TON community to come up with the criteria for evaluating the effectiveness of projects.

In any case, in order to ensure transparency, better classification and efficiency of assessing applications, the whole process will be migrated to Questbook, reported The TON Society channel.

We will have more details from the organizers later, but they are already hinting at the possibility of getting feedback on the submitted applications, something that was obviously lacking. Some projects could not get a clear answer on their application for months, and if they did, no the reason for the decision was given.

By the way, TON Society has announced a list of new grantees: TON Run, TON Link, TON&Co, TON Metaspace, and TON Tel Aviv Meetup (Mint Labs).

@DeepTonEng will gladly keep you posted on grant system updates.

👛 The roadmap for 2023 is here

Many components that will expand the use of blockchain technology in TON services and products will be introduced this year.

➡️Already this month, on February 21, validators will vote on optimizing the network's tokenomics. Their decision about whether to freeze genesis wallets will influence the development of the ecosystem.

➡️ Moreover, a deflationary mechanism has been conceived to burn part of the commissions from each transaction.

➡️ Coming up next will be Token Bridge - enabling the exchange of any tokens between the TON, Ethereum and BSC networks, including USDT, USDC and many other coins.

➡️Work will continue on TON Connect, a protocol for communication between wallets and applications within the TON ecosystem. Now that TON Connect 2.0 is already working, the focus will be on launching full-fledged dApps using a single instance of authorization on websites and applications.

➡️An official smart contract for staking has been proposed, DAO & Liquidity Staking, with no minimum amount requirements. Currently, staking is only offered for over 10K coins at a time.

➡️ TON users will be able to send encrypted messages between addresses directly from their wallets, like a messenger.

➡️ There will be more developments on the separation of roles between collectors and validators. Their interaction is crucial for enabling unlimited network bandwidth.

Check out the roadmap, ask any questions, and we will gladly provide answers.

Those are some great news, @DeepTonEng