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After being abandoned by Telegram, how is TON now?

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The CTO of TON Labs recently accepted an interview and introduced the latest progress of the project.

Original title: "Q&A: What happened after Telegram abandoned TON?" "

Original source: Cointelegraph

Original translation: 0x33

Although Telegram abandoned TON earlier this year, But the technology underpinning the project continues. Because TON is an open source project, all its codes are published on GitHub, so the story is far from over, and the community has begun to continue to push forward the project spontaneously.

Recently, foreign media Cointelegraph had a conversation with Mitja Goroshevsky, chief technology officer of TON Labs, the core infrastructure developer of TON , he introduced the current development level and community participation of TON.

1. What happened after Telegram left TON?

Mitja Goroshevsky: The community came together and independently launched the Free TON network based on TON technology. Drafted the first version of the Decentralization Manifesto. As others started to contribute and add to the manifesto, more and more members got involved: commenting, tweaking, and helping it grow.

From the beginning, there has been participation and interest in TON. They were excited to start the project as members of the community, and they all worked hard to spread the word about it. Ultimately, TON quickly grew as a community-driven project.

2. Is the Telegram app still involved in the project?

Mitja Goroshevsky: No. Telegram has publicly stated that they have completely abandoned the project.

3. What inspired the formation of Free TON?

Mitja Goroshevsky: I think this is a natural reaction. When so many people put so much time and effort into a project, only to have it suddenly pulled because the money raised was raised in a way that someone (blocked) didn't like is just devastating.

These people have an amazing technology but are deprived of the opportunity to continue to develop it, it is too unbearable up. There's no term for the mood and what happened, but that's what actually happened.

A free world should not be like this. Free TON proves this.

4. How is Free TON different from the planned Telegram open network?

Mitja Goroshevsky: I think the main difference is a very strong community that can drive development both at a technical level and at a governance level . The original TON had no public clarity on how governance should work.

Governance was a very early plan in the original design. Validators will vote to approve protocol changes, nothing more. There is simply no vision of how to engage the community in the governance of the platform.

Free TON has taken a more open approach because now it's all about the community. A number of technical changes have been made as we move forward, with more to come. The developer ecosystem and tools look very different, and there are many changes to the protocol.

5. When will the Free TON mainnet launch?

Mitja Goroshevsky: The Free TON network was launched on May 7th and has been running since then. We call it a Betanet, but there were never plans to relaunch the mainnet.

This is a gradual transition, and the definition of the main network is somewhat vague. The more decentralized it is, the closer it is to the mainnet. With almost 400 validators added right now, I'd say it's as good as any other network out there.

6. This is a competitive space - how does Free TON differentiate itself from other blockchains?

Mitja Goroshevsky: Technically Free TON is one of the fastest and most scalable networks in existence today. It has a unique design of multi-threaded sharding architecture. This allows it to have one of the fastest block generation times (currently averaging 0.2 seconds across the network) and virtually unlimited scalability.

An important note is that these figures were obtained on a completely permissionless network on the public internet, not on obtained in the laboratory. It is now ready to use. It has very mature developer tools and supports different programming languages and dozens of platforms.

But the power of Free TON comes from its community, tens of thousands of people participate in governance activities. They are involved in making hundreds of decisions and building use cases for the network. Typically, a PoS blockchain starts by selling its tokens to future validators in order to create a starting point for this game economy. At Free TON, everyone knows immediately that tokens will not be sold to anyone. The hard problem we have to solve is how to distribute tokens in this way through game theory, but still distribute through PoS.

Free TON found a revolutionary solution to this problem in the Meritocratic token distribution model. It starts with a competition proposed by the community, in which all other members can participate. The contest is debated and a soft majority vote is used to decide whether a proposal should proceed.

Now, any member of the community can participate by submitting an entry to the contest. Finally, a jury of community members will vote on the entries for these competitions and distribute tokens to the winners, respectively.

7. What is the biggest challenge that Free TON has faced since its launch?

Mitja Goroshevsky: The community faces new challenges every day both technically and within the community. It's very intense and fun. We write a lot of software. We are constantly improving the protocol, including the tooling around it. We support and organize validators and developers. We discuss and embrace collaboration - essentially partnership. There are dozens of races going on all the time. The community is really busy.

8. How many people are currently participating in Free TON ?

Mitja Goroshevsky: I don’t know the exact number, but practically nobody does, but there are hundreds of Telegram channels and thousands million users, developers and validators. New collaborators join the community every day. The community members themselves are wonderful people - they are very open, helpful and involved.

9. What is the main goal of Free TON in the future?

Mitja Goroshevsky: Free TON is a community-driven blockchain with the goal of serving that community. This blockchain is designed to support millions of users, therefore, further development and adoption is required. Our decentralized governance needs to evolve as we encounter new obstacles.