What Happened to the TON Network: How The Project Will Solve The Problem

The TON network has slowed down significantly following a surge in activity that some attribute to the launch of processes known as “inscriptions.” The TON Foundation has published a “Technical Incident Report”.

TON20’s “inscription” feature, similar to BRC20, caused the blockchain to generate more than 2 million transactions in half an hour, and network usage increased 61 times. As a result, the TON network was severely overloaded, and the verification was delayed, as @WuBlockchain described the problem on their X (Twitter). According to TonStat, a website that provides data on TON, there were about 2 million transactions as of December 5th and another 800 thousand transactions as of December 6th. This is a significant increase from approximately 266 thousand transactions on December 4th.

Previously, TON has made claims that it has set a “world TPS record” and will be able to process millions of transactions per second. However, the current blockchain situation does not match these claims, while the TON Foundation blames the validators, claiming that they are “running on weak hardware.” In response to the problem, the TON Foundation has released a new version of the software that focuses on increasing timeouts and managing large queues.

Controversy could be brewing around the network as TON believes it can convince validators to switch to new hardware if they change the “system of decentralized penalties for validators who do their job poorly or incorrectly.” Such a decision may discourage validators from working with the network.