What’s TON?

TON stands for “The Open Network”. It’s a scalable L1 blockchain that was originally developed by Telegram, then made open-source and now developed by the independent TON Foundation.

If you were around during the wild ICO era of 2018-2019, you probably remember the story: Telegram raised $1.7 billion in its $GRAM pre-sale but had to abandon the project because of issues with the SEC. The regulator claimed that the pre-sale had been an unregistered security offering, and eventually the company decided to refund all the investors rather than battle against the Securities and Exchange Commission. You can learn more from our previous article about TON.

Luckily, Telegram rendered the whole codebase public, so that development could continue, driven by the TON Foundation and its core developers, Kirill Emelyanenko and Anatoliy Makosov. They successfully launched TON on mainnet, and now the blockchain processes an average of 3-4 transactions per second – more than Polkadot, for example.

Perhaps the most interesting part of TON’s architecture is sharding. While Ethereum has been planning to introduce sharding for years, yet the community-driven TON Network has had it virtually from the get-go!

1) First, there’s the masterchain with its validators who stake TON.

2) The second level is composed of up to 232 workchains where user transactions are executed. They can have different rules depending on the use cases they are built for (DeFi, gaming, etc.).

3) Finally, any workchain can be split into up to 260 shards that process transactions in parallel. The total theoretical processing capacity of the network can rise to millions of TPS.

On top of all this, smart contracts on TON are asynchronous. When a user’s action requires several contracts to interact with each other, they can do it in parallel, without waiting for each previous interaction to finish – something that you can’t pull off on Ethereum.

You may not hear much about TON in the media, but the network constantly makes important product updates. For example, in October 2022 TON launched a wallet bot for crypto transfers on Telegram, and in July 2023, encrypted transaction messaging was enabled.

NFTs on TON

TON is one of those chains that have thriving NFT ecosystems that somehow fly under the radar. The main marketplaces are  GetGems, TON Diamonds, and Disintar.

There’s a lot of quirky and original art here, though you’ll also find the standard variations on apes and punks. Curiously, though, the best-selling collections of all time aren’t PFPs but rather Telegram Usernames, Anonymous Telegram Numbers, and TON DNS Domains. They are followed by TON Diamonds (simple geometric jewels; the first NFT on TON) and Animals Red List (rare species of frogs, snakes, fish, etc.).

TON does have a few P2E and metaverse projects, such as Crazy Llama Farm, MineGnomes, and Rotgar Game, but so far it’s more about collections. This creates an interesting opening for gaming projects on other chains that would like to expand to TON.

Bridging NFTs to and from TON with XP.NETWORK: the technical challenge

TON is a non-EVM blockchain: it uses its own TON Virtual Machine, and its smart contracts are written in FunC, a language created specifically for this network and based on C.

The NFT token standards on TON are TEP-62 and TEP-64. Apart from a collection contract, each individual NFT has its own smart contract – this can seem like a very complex solution, but actually this way NFTs from the same collection can be processed on different shards for faster performance. It’s also not difficult to pull information about all the NFTs in a collection, as long as they are ordered.

XP.NETWORK has huge experience working with non-EVM NFT token standards: we already support over 10 of them. It’s always an interesting challenge to implement yet another standard, with contracts in a different language.

NFT projects need to understand, however, that in order to bridge a collection to TON, their collection smart contract needs to be essentially recreated. This has to be done for each collection individually- though we do have our templates, to save time, of course.

This procedure is the same for all non-EVM chains we support. XP.NETWORK’s V.3.0 bridge does enable automated whitelisting and contract deployment for EVM blockchains (Ethereum, Polygon, Avalanche, BNB Chain, etc.), as they all use the same NFT token code standard. But when it comes to non-EVM (TON, Tezos, Solana, Aptos, MultiversX, etc.), a tailored approach is needed depending on the smart contract logic (royalties, rarities, etc.).

Why bridge NFTs to TON, anyway?

If you have an NFT project on Ethereum, Polygon, etc., there are a few reasons to consider an expansion to TON:

1) A “fresh” community and market where the interest for new collections is high. You can boost sales and followers without spending too much on marketing, as a collection bridged from another network is always an exciting curiosity.

2) High speed and extremely low fees compared to Ethereum and even BNB Chain. It can make a lot of sense to run an initial NFT sale on Ethereum (as liquidity is higher), then build the actual game or metaverse on TON.

3) Viral engagement campaigns: if your community is tired of basic “follow and retweet” giveaways, how about a campaign where you get a prize for bridging an NFT to TON?

As for bridging from TON, the main reason is to gain visibility. TON is an amazing chain with a passionate community, but not too many people know about it yet. So every NFT project on TON eventually runs into a sort of a growth barrier, where sales volume stalls and user acquisition costs rise. That’s when branching out to a larger chain like Polygon can be a smart business move.

TON NFTs moving across the bridge: XP.NETWORK Explorer stats

A reminder: XP.NETWORK has an awesome Explorer tool where you can look up NFT bridging transactions by chain, status, etc. Actually it’s the first NFT bridging explorer of its kind.

Since we implemented TON a few months ago, over 170 NFTs have been moved from other chains to the TON ecosystem.  Many were from Polygon – not surprising, really, considering how much of NFT trading on OpenSea is now done on Polygon with its very low fees.

There have also been some transfers from Avalanche (e.g. Rock, Punks Unchained), BNB Chain (Polkamon, Tegro Cats, Tegro Dogs), Fantom (Cursed Transistor), and even Iotex (Treasureland).

Among other “exotic” chains that XP.NETWORK connected to TON for the first time in NFT history were MultiversX, NEAR, and Moonbeam. Granted, only a few NFTs were moved on each occasion, but we are proud to be the pioneers and to open up new avenues.

As for bridging from TON to other chains, there have been over 160 transfers so far. We can point out the Goblin Girl collection, which you can find on GetGems, Chuwee Boys, MetaPanthers, and – with the most transfers of all – our latest partner, TON Frogs (follow the blog updates for an announcement).

The rest of the transactions were unfreezes, meaning previously bridged NFTs getting sent back to the home chain. In this case, the original NFT is unlocked on the bridge contract, and its bridged version on the destination chain is burned. It’s very common for NFTs to make such return journeys over the bridge – for example, when you run an engagement campaign where users are invited to bridge their assets back eventually to put them into staking or game on the original chain.