Q&A session was held in the OKEx Telegram chat (link to the first post, questions and answers start below it). We’ve compiled the whole series into one material and present it below:
AMA Date & Time: 11 November, 2021 13:00 (UTC)
Moderator: Lennix Lai, Director OKEx
Guest: Oleg Andreev, Tonkeeper product lead, a member of TON developers team
On November 11, an AMA session was held with OKEx Director Lennix Lay and Oleg Andreev, Tonkeeper product lead.
Oleg Andreev, a blockchain developer, is one of the few publicly associating himself with the project. Andreev himself has a long history of acquaintance with Pavel Durov’s projects: he used to work at VKontakte and was engaged in the development of video storage systems there. Then he left for the USA and was engaged in blockchain projects for more than six years. Now he lives in Europe and is working on the reincarnation of TON. Which became his main development.
Loki@OKEx:
Let me present the AMA Schedule for OKEx and TON event:
Session 1: Group will be muted to have 10 questions for our guest, Oleg Andreev.
Session 2: Group will be opened for community to ask their questions for 5 minutes. Oleg will select 10 questions to answer.
So let’s start with 1st Session now.
OKEx Director Lennix Lai will be moderating the AMA today and our guest is Oleg Andreev.
Let’s welcome them and let’s get going!
Oleg Andreev:
Hello everyone! I’m excited to answer your questions.
Loki@OKEx:
Thank you for being here. Lennix the floor is yours.
Lennix Lai:
Hey everyone, and thank you all for joining us today. My name is Lennix, and I’m the Director of OKEx and looking forward to have this session with Oleg, Tonkeeper product lead. So let’s begin our AMA Series!
Hi, Oleg! thanks for joining us tonight!
Can you tell us what is TON?
Oleg Andreev:
TON stands for The Open Network.
It is a fully operational layer-one proof-of-stake blockchain that’s designed to grow naturally in order to handle millions of transactions per second and accomodate billions of users.
Its smart contract engine (“TVM”) permits building not only financial contracts, but a whole range of decentralized apps (dapps) thanks to its horizontal scalability.
Lennix Lai:
Amazing! Now what is the story behind TON?
Oleg Andreev:
TON was designed by Dr. Nikolai Durov and built by the team at Telegram.
Nikolai Valerievich, defended his Ph.D. thesis in 2005 under the guidance of Sergei Vladimirovich Vostokov on the topic: “A new approach to the geometry of Arakelov.” And in 2007 he received his PhD in Bonn. He defended his thesis under the guidance of Gerd Faltings, its topic – “A new approach to the geometry of Arakelov”. In it, developing Grothendieck’s ideas, he introduces the structure of “generalized rings” for the needs of arithmetic geometry, one of the examples of which is the so-called “field of one element” (one of the strict constructions of which belongs to Durov). Then he continued his mathematical education at the University of Bonn, where he later received his doctorate, defended his dissertation under the direction of Gerd Faltings.
Unfortunately, Telegram had to withdraw from the project and left the software, tools and the test network to the community of enthusiasts and developers. Instead of selling or destroying their coins, the team locked them up in the proof-of-work contracts, so that anyone could mine them in an open auction.
To this day, coins have been distributed through these contracts openly and in a decentralized manner. Later, a group of highly committed developers from all over the world formed in a self-organized non-profit group “TON Foundation” to continue work on the network’s infrastructure. Now without Telegram’s involvement.
Lennix Lai:
Now there are several coins with “TON” in their name, how do we know which one is yours?
Oleg Andreev:
Our project was previously known as “NewTON”, but now it has been renamed to simply “TON” after Telegram had agreed to give up the ton.org domain to the TON Foundation. This project is a direct continuation of the testnet left by Telegram, that last summer was renamed into mainnet after extensive testing and improvements in stability.
There’s also FreeTON which was recently renamed into Everscale. That’s a commercial product by “TON Labs” who originally planned to build infrastructure around Telegram’s network. They started with the original technology, but now they heavily rewrite and reshape it to their needs.
There is (was?) an obscure ERC-20 token on Ethereum called “TON Token”, but it has no relation to TON technology or community.
The coins on the TON network are called Toncoins, to be clear.
Lennix Lai:
Thank you for the clarification. Can you tell us what makes TON unique?
Oleg Andreev:
TON is one of the very few proof-of-stake horizontally scalable blockchain networks that are in production already. It is designed by world-class experts in distributed networking, highload systems and security. The goal is to have TON scaled to perform well at the layer-one, that makes user and developer experience close to that of centralized commercial products, which in turn helps adoption.
Also, unlike many of the competitors, distribution of Toncoins was done in the open, through the proof-of-work contracts. In other words, coin supply is not concentrated in the hands of a few whales or a single governing organization.
Finally, TON aims at becoming an internet-scale storage and dapp platform that connects many blockchains and enables people to build next-generation internet services that are supported by the open uncensorable payment network.
Lennix Lai:
Amazing! Are you able to tell us how many people use TON?
Oleg Andreev:
The network is still young, but it has been growing exponentially. Today we have over 80’000 active accounts, while several thousands of users download wallets each month.
Lennix Lai:
Do you plan to leverage the Telegram platform for TON?
Oleg Andreev:
Yes. Telegram is no longer involved in the project, but members of the dev community are well familiar with Telegram and its infrastructure.
First, Telegram is used for most of the communication in the TON community, as well as in the wider crypto/blockchain community. Second, there is a lot of shared expertise between TON and the Telegram UX that allows us to bring exciting new products that integrate with Telegram seamlessly.
Lennix Lai:
Couldn’t agree with you more.
Now, what are the current use cases for TON?
Oleg Andreev:
Currently, TON is an instant peer-to-peer payments system with low transaction fees that’s very easy to use. In a collaboration with the TON dev community, at Tonkeeper we are working on cool new payment features, that are easier and safer than credit cards and not vulnerable to censorship by a centralized payment gateways.
More specifically, we are building truly peer-to-peer subscription service that will let content creators offer exclusive content to their followers for monthly/weekly payments. That would leverage TON’s smart contract features in order to offer users complete control over their wallet. It will be easy to use both for the creators and users, but there will no central org to hold accounts and control payouts. It will be completely peer-to-peer. We are still working on this, so stay tuned for the updates.
Lennix Lai:
What’s on your roadmap?
Oleg Andreev:
TON is an ambitious project. First of all, we are happy that TON developers delivered on their promises and launched the mainnet, built wallets for all major platforms, released SDKs and also launched bridges to Ethereum and Binance.
The next big feature on the roadmap is software support for issuance of custom tokens and NFTs in order to bring high-speed DEX and AMMs to the TON network.
In the longer term, there are plans to add support for micropayments over a Lightning (“LN”) protocol directly on TON, decentralized DNS and storage. That would enable a wide range of decentralized applications.
Lennix Lai:
Thank you for sharing all this information sounds super exciting. And lastly how to get Toncoins?
Oleg Andreev:
Toncoins are listed on a few exchanges, OKEx is the most noticeable one. Soon other major exchanges will follow. There are also several payment gateways that allow buying Toncoins with credit card.
Most importantly, with Tonkeeper we aim to provide ways to earn Toncoin directly so we bootstrap its own economy, which includes payments for online services, donations and subscriptions.
You can be rewarded as a validator.
Validators are network nodes that confirm transactions on the TON blockchain and are rewarded for this from the transaction fees that users pay. To become a validator, you need to have a significant amount of Toncoin in your account. The validator freezes them and thereby makes a deposit to the network. If his validator becomes inoperable and thereby causes damage to the network, then he will receive a penalty (for example, in the amount of 1% of the total amount).
Validators can engage third-party network users on Toncoin to collect the required deposit to confirm transactions. For this, the validator shares a part of its commission (it is set by each validator at its discretion, due to which there is competition between them for user funds). Thus, ordinary network users can earn through delegation, but at the same time they bear risks along with the validator in case of instability of its work, which will entail penalties.
As a result, the system is built in such a way that users’ coins will go to reliable validators with the maximum commission for users, thanks to which only the best will support the network.
Later, it will be possible to compare and select validators using their rating.
Loki@OKEx:
Thank you Lennix and Oleg for the amazing first segment of today’s AMA. I believe it helped to understand the project, its importance and innovation!
Lennix Lai:
Thank you Oleg, very excited to see everything TON has in store for us!
Oleg Andreev:
Thank you! I’m as excited as you are!
Loki@OKEx:
The first AMA segment is over so lets move to the next one!
Are you ready to ask your questions?
Oleg the floor is yours, pick the ones you like.
Oleg Andreev:
Wow, what an amazing crowd!
I won’t be able to answer all 3000 questions today, so let’s pick a few of the most exciting that I can answer.
Lady of Jardin: What are the advantages of TON over its competitors?
Oleg Andreev:
The advantage comes down to several factors: first, it the people. Second it’s the vision.
TON was conceived and is being supported by real geniuses: engineers with wide variety of expertise, deep understanding of networks, security, finance and product UX. And they are very committed to it: they picked it up and maintained at their own expense for long time and want it to open a new territory of freedom and creativity on the internet.
Second, the vision is big: if we are going to find a solution to a scalable global decentralized consensus, then let’s not be limited to moving money around. The vision is to make it an internet-scale platform for many applications that go beyond paying and trading financial assets.
Aladdin: What are the tools for developing on TON?
Oleg Andreev:
TON has SDKs for major programming langauges to connect your app to the TON network. You can find the docs here: https://ton.org/docs.
At the heart of TON, there is a distributed Virtual Machine architecture that lets developers write custom applications (“contracts”) and deploy them into TON. The low-level code is called Fift, and a user-friendly language is called FunC (because it looks like C and is much more fun to use.
Broken Dream: Which one of these aspects is important for you? 1-Increasing Token Price & Value 2-Empowering Platform Development 3-Building Community Trust 4-Expanding Partnership Globally In what order?
Oleg Andreev:
Excellent question. The #1 and #3 is not what we have any control over, but what we all deserve in the end of the day.
We, the developers, really focus on building useful tools for fellow developers and users worldwide. This comes down to relationship with developers and open source work that expands the infrastructure, and using commercial partnerships to deliver exciting new products to users on top of that powerful infrastructure. Those two things are really working together, because one does not make much sense without the other.
Joselyn Kim: Can you share to us your tokenomics? How much is the total and circulation supply of your tokens? Will there be buy back system or token burning in the future?
Oleg Andreev:
There is about 5 billion coins that were mined by anyone on the internet, and a tiny inflation (≈0.6%/a IIRC) minted as a part of the reward for the validators (which is embedded in the protocol). There is no organization that controls the supply. TON foundation was formed with zero and collected voluntary donations from those who mined coins to support its developers.
DeathNWar: Can you share your social media links so we can keep ourselves updated?
Oleg Andreev:
Please subscribe to https://t.me/toncoin channel for news and updates.
(Editor’s note:You can find even more information about TON in Give me Gram! – analytics, instructions, author’s opinion, insides. We also publish news in TON News channel – sometimes earlier than the official channel. You can follow the rate of Toncoin in Telegram bot @TonometerBot– this bot is developed by our team and is placed on the official site of TON project).
SPIDERMAN: Can you list 1-3 killer features of Your Project that makes it ahead of its competitors? What is the competitive advantage your platform has that you feel most confident about?
Oleg Andreev:
Speed – Low cost – Great UX.
Elvina Faison: Current NFT is a hot topic, but are NFT not just for art. Does your project think that more real world use cases will emerge for NFTs as time goes on, why should we take NFTs seriously?
Oleg Andreev:
Generally speaking, NFT is just a sort of custom token issuance. That’s very important because DNS is the original NFT and a highly useful service. Also, all sort of real-world tokens like receipts, tickets and coupons are all becoming digital. Tokenizing them on a blockchain is what makes them secure and also opens up a lot of new services. But blockchains traditionally are very hard to scale, so those usecases remained dormant. We hope that scalability of TON will change that.
Jon Mcclain: Too many projects promise magic but never release any working product or prove any revenue, Within a short/long time of release. Is your project also like this? If not can u tell us, What makes your project different from other projects?
Oleg Andreev:
That’s true about many projects. TON is different because it actually works, today, it is being battle-tested and can be used by anyone already. The network is so easy to use that we can test our products directly on mainnet without resorting to a simulated/sandboxed environment. The product of my team, Tonkeeper, is already released on Google and Apple platforms and we are continuously delivering updates that bring new features and improvements.
Tú Anh RiNNN: Where i can get all the latest news about? Do you have Twitter/Telegram/Discord community? If yes can you share the link here because there is a lot of fake Telegram/Twitter groups?
Oleg Andreev:
Please join @toncoin channel for the updates from the community!
(Editor’s note:You can find even more information about TON in Give me Gram! – analytics, instructions, author’s opinion, insides. We also publish news in TON News channel – sometimes earlier than the official channel. You can follow the rate of Toncoin in Telegram bot @TonometerBot– this bot is developed by our team and is placed on the official site of TON project).
Loki@OKEx:
Thank you Oleg for your answers!
