Telegram's "3rd Generation" Proof of Stake Blockchain

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There's so many different blockchains and different flavors of blockchains that it's nearly impossible to keep up with all of them. I have my select few that I use day to day and that list seems to keep growing. As more projects build their own chains, it gets even tougher to have interoperability between those chains.

TON - The Open Network

TON is Telegram's own scalable blockchain network that's been being built over the course of the past year or so. The self-proclaimed 3rd generation proof of stake blockchain is supposed to be capable of millions of transactions per second, something no current chain can handle. The TON blockchain has a very unique architecture with one master chain and up to 292 accompanying blockchains. I'm not certain, but I assume similar to the way Polkadot has parachains. The whole thing seems very complicated and consists of a lot of different moving parts. I guess they are developing all of these different parts separately to keep it modular and scalable. I'm no developer or software engineer so this is just purely ad educated guess.

Will this thing ever fully come together? I dunno. It sounds pretty awesome and seems to solve problems we currently face with existing blockchain technologies. Again, I'm no developer so it just sounds really complicated to make actually work. I keep getting stuck on the "millions of transactions per seconds" and decentralization. Typically, faster chains are more centralized (I think) so I really don't know how this is going to be the case. In terms of ease of use - this seems to be a huge focus. Supposedly the TON DNS will make blockchain "mainstream" by assigning human-readable names to accounts, smart contracts, services, and network nodes. The aim is to make browsing blockchain similar to surfing the web like we do every day. Pretty damn cool, I just wanna see it work.

They have a pretty awesome timeline available on the website as well. It even highlights where they failed and shit. Cool that they would leave this transparent in the actual timeline. Good on them. It just shows how hard it is to build this kind of cutting-edge technology. It all started back in 2018. Sounds like so long ago.

There's a lesson to be learned from this very transparent timeline as well. If you believe in something, never stop believing, even when no one else does. Even in the face of opposition from the U.S. government. Fuck the system.

The community steps in and takes control. Decentralize! Let the community take the wheel when all else fails.

As you can see, there's a metric shit ton of work and building that still needs to be done for TON to work. There's even going to be Bitcoin and Ethereum VM "workchains" so interoperability is a focus. What really doesn't make sense to me as that TON is supposed to be a proof of stake chain. This means that proof of work mining isn't necessary, but rather staking of Toncoin. I guess that's wrong though because if you look at the website, there's a mining tab that breaks down proof of work mining of Toncoin. So is it technically a hybrid chain that is both proof of work and proof of stake? Kinda.

Once all Toncoins have been mined, there's no more mining. Everything is then shifted to proof of work? Sounds redundant to me. Looking at the stats of the network at present, there's 159 validators and currently processing about 1.43 transactions per second. Probably because no one is using the chain, because that's pretty far off from millions per second.

The one thing that TON does have going for it is the integration into the Telegram app. With build in wallets, users can store, send, and receive crypto. It even supports Binance Smart Chain. Interoperability is key. I highly recommend watching out for more updates on TON. Seems really cool if it actually works and starts getting used at scale. What do you think?