TON, also known as The Open Network or Toncoin is a third-generation proof-of-stake blockchain that was designed by the Durov brothers, the founders of Telegram Messenger. It was designed to be fast, cheap, eco-friendly and user-friendly. Today it is fully operational and is fully decentralized layer-1 blockchain.

In 2018, Telegram raised a whopping $1.7 billion through an initial coin offering (ICO), making it the largest ICO in the history at the time.

It was initially planned to be used as a payment method within the Telegram ecosystem, but after a legal battle with the SEC in 2019, the development of TON was stopped, and the funds were returned to investors.

Despite this setback, a small team of open-source developers, known as NewTON, have continued to work on TON since 2020. They have resumed active development of TON and renamed their team as the TON Foundation. The TON Foundation is a not-for-profit community that is focused on further supporting and developing the network.

In TON, a new block is generated on each shardchain and the masterchain approximately every 5 s...