The main feature of TON: sharding in simple terms
An image of a skyscraper in London called The Shard. It comes up in the search results when you google sharding images.
In the public perception, TON is simply “Durov’s cryptocurrency” that stands out from hundreds of others solely due to its association with Telegram. So, what makes it interesting at all now if the project continued to develop outside of Telegram following the SEC’s decision? This way of thinking about TON overlooks the key technical feature which might turn the possibility of having a crypto wallet in every pocket into a reality.
Background
When Bitcoin first made a loud statement, there were many discussions about its future. Was this technology as revolutionary as the internet, and would everyone soon be using it? Or was it just another fad that would soon be forgotten?
Ten years later, neither of these two predictions has come true. Most people live comfortably without cryptocurrencies. However, blockchains haven’t been forgotten; on the contrary, they have continued to develop over these past ten years, with the number of transactions steadily increasing. Following Bitcoin, Ethereum emerged, as did stablecoins and much more.
Now the question is different. Are cryptocurrencies forever destined to be niche solutions that solve their own problems but are not required by most people? Or could it be that they are simply not ready for mass adoption, but will eventually conquer the world?
No one can give a definite answer. Although, when contemplating this, it is important to remember that the initial implementations of Bitcoin and Ethereum were simply not technically suitable for mass usage. Bitcoin could process fewer than 7 transactions per second, while Ethereum could handle less than 30. For comparison, Visa handles thousands. Blockchains lag behind in this aspect due to their decentralization: they require independent nodes to constantly “agree” with each other in order to approve each new transaction, unlike Visa.
What happens when there are more transactions than the blockchain can handle? In this case, if you want your transaction to be processed faster, you have to pay a higher fee than others. These fees can skyrocket, severely limiting the utility of the entire endeavor for the mass market. If John needs to pay back Pete twenty dollars but finds out that it requires paying an additional forty dollars in fees on the blockchain, then there is little benefit for him in doing so.
For blockchain to achieve global popularity, it needs to accommodate billions of users, process all transactions reliably and quickly, and have low fees. However, it turns out that the concept of blockchain itself poorly aligns with these technical requirements. So, how can it conquer the world?
These issues have been extensively discussed — there is even a separate Wikipedia article on the “Bitcoin Scalability Problem”. As a result, some solutions have emerged, often classified as “L2” (Layer 2). The idea behind these solutions is that the original blockchain is considered Layer 1 (L1), and Layer 2 is the additional component that offloads some of the activity “off-chain” and partially relieves the L1. For Bitcoin, there is Lightning Network, and Ethereum has “rollups.”
This helps only to some extent. However, when critical functionality is moved to “layers” or “extensions,” it’s easy to end up with something like this:
While solving one problem, others arise. In June, Vitalik Buterin wrote that for Ethereum to progress, everyone needs to move to rollups. Previously, he acknowledged this transition is necessary, but it is also challenging. Cryptocurrencies are already complicated enough for the average person, and when Ethereum requires understanding a zoo of L2 solutions on top of that, it gets even harder.
When users encounter difficulties, it hinders the popularity of cryptocurrencies. Additionally, rollups do not completely solve the problem: while the fees there may be lower than directly on Ethereum, they can still be too high for microtransactions, and the throughput ceiling increases significantly but still has its limits.
TON’s Approach
When it comes to the question of whether cryptocurrencies will conquer the world, TON provides a decisive answer: yes, that is the goal. In this regard, the project is exceedingly ambitious. The key developer, Anatoly Makosov, boldly stated:
“Only 4.2% of the world’s population uses cryptocurrencies. It is still a small number, similar to the internet audience in 1998. Therefore, we are primarily focused not on the existing crypto audience but on the remaining 95.8% of the world’s population. […]
If, in the end, TON has as many users as the Ethereum blockchain or the Binance exchange, personally, I will not consider it a success; I will consider it a failure.”
The extent to which these massive ambitions are justified is up to each individual to decide. Even so, simply because they exist indicates that TON did not follow in the footsteps of Bitcoin and Ethereum. If you aim to target the entire population of the Earth, you won’t create a system that can only handle 7 transactions per second and then attempt to fix it with “add-ons.” Instead, you will think about the necessary throughput from the very beginning, laying it directly into the foundation.
Furthermore, in comparison to Bitcoin and Ethereum, TON emerged later and was able to learn from their experiences. When Bitcoin was launched, nobody could predict whether its throughput capacity would become a problem or whether humanity would never run into limitations. At that time, it was much more important to understand the fundamental principles of blockchain, and Satoshi Nakamoto excelled at it.
Ethereum also addressed a more pressing issue at the time. By adding the ability to execute arbitrary code on the blockchain, Vitalik Buterin expanded on Bitcoin’s achievements. This was a significant leap forward, paving the way for an entire world of blockchain applications.
TON went even further by combining the achievements of both predecessors (the idea of blockchain and smart contracts) and adding true scalability so that everyone on planet Earth could benefit from these advancements, rather than just a small group of geeks.
That is why the project’s whitepaper, outlining Nikolai Durov’s ideas, focuses heavily on scalability. These concerns became crucial even during the design phase, long before the launch. This allowed for the implementation of a truly revolutionary concept in TON, as integrating such a concept into an already established project would be unlikely. But what exactly is this concept?
The Infinite Sharding Paradigm
Sharding is based on a simple idea: “if something becomes too big, you can divide it into smaller segments.” If you need to quickly consume a large cake, doing it with just one teaspoon would be inefficient. However, if you slice it into many pieces, equip each piece with a teaspoon, and distribute them among different people, the task will be completed much faster. But implementations of this simple idea can be complex.
The concept itself existed even before blockchains. In the world of traditional databases, people long pondered over how to scale a database when a single computer was no longer sufficient. They arrived at the idea of “dividing it into parts and storing them separately.”
This idea was also relevant when the question of “how to process a large number of cryptocurrency transactions” arose. By dividing the blockchain into a series of interconnected “shards,” it becomes possible to process a much higher number of transactions compared to the traditional approach, where all transactions pass through a single “narrow bottleneck.”
Of course, TON is not the only blockchain project that has contemplated this concept. Various individuals, including Vitalik Buterin, who envisioned sharding as the future of Ethereum (but has currently focused on rollups), have written about sharding. However, the Infinite Sharding Paradigm described in the TON whitepaper differs from most other projects.
The straightforward approach to sharding is to “divide into N parts.” It is not so crucial what exact value N takes; what matters is that it is a specific number. “Let’s slice the cake into 16 pieces.”
Yes, it helps with increasing throughput. However, what if at one point even that is not enough, and the value is already fixed? Creating a “million shards just in case” is also not a good solution (you don’t even know the size of the cake yet, but you already need a million spoons and a million eaters). It is impossible to accurately predict the load in advance. What can be done then?
During the design of TON, two key decisions were made. Firstly, this blockchain can be dynamically sharded based on the network’s load. If the number of transactions becomes too high, it splits in half into two “shardchains.” If later on, one of the halves becomes overloaded, it is also split in half, and so on. And if the number of transactions decreases, the shards are “merged” again. As a result, there are as many shards as required based on the current load.
An illustration by Denis Olshin depicts the principle of division using binary account addresses: all addresses starting with a zero are placed in one half, while those starting with a one go into the other half.
Even if the number of shards changes “on the go”, there must still be some maximum limit, right? What limit was set? How was it chosen? Is it certain that it will be enough? This is where the second solution comes into play: TON completely reverses the conventional approach to sharding.
The conventional approach involves initially viewing the blockchain as a unified entity: “Here is our cake, how many pieces should we slice it into to have enough?” In TON, however, the approach is fundamentally different: it treats everything as a gigantic set of minimal particles (individual blockchain addresses) that can “merge” together. In other words, it’s like seeing the cake not as one tasty treat, but as a collection of atoms. How many pieces can you divide a set of atoms into? As many as you want. Theoretically, there is a limit somewhere, where each atom becomes separate and can no longer be divided. But in practical terms, you will never encounter this limit when dealing with any practical task.
This bottom-up approach, rather than a top-down one, leads to the notion that this division can be considered “infinite.” Hence the name “infinite sharding paradigm.”
As a result, while “classic” blockchains address scalability through “L2 add-ons,” TON scales as much as necessary without any such additions.
Conclusion
In addition to sharding, it is worth mentioning that TON has a short block formation time (a few seconds, rather than 10 minutes like Bitcoin) and low fees. For microtransactions that require even faster and cheaper processing, the whitepaper describes its own equivalent of the “Lightning Network’’ called “TON Payments.”
As mentioned earlier, for the entire planet to start using blockchain, it is necessary for it to handle the load, process all transactions reliably, quickly, and affordably. And TON is precisely focused on these aspects.
Of course, this does not automatically mean that the entire planet will inevitably start using it. The success of the project depends on various factors. However, at least an important technical factor, without which achieving mass success would be significantly challenging, has been implemented.
Of course, this does not imply that TON is perfect in every aspect. Such scalability inevitably brings other challenges — for example, writing smart contracts for TON proves to be a more complex task.
And of course, this does not mean that all other blockchains are bad. They have their own advantages and approaches to scalability.
What all this means is that TON isn’t just “Durov saw Bitcoin’s success and decided to do the same in Telegram.” It is not the same. A significant amount of technical work has been done on TON in order to address the key problems of blockchains. The result is a technically unique project that stands out even being independent of Telegram.
Whether it will conquer the planet, in part, depends on us.
Author: Eugene Trifonov
About TON
TON is a third-generation proof-of-stake blockchain designed in 2018 by the Durov brothers, the founders of Telegram Messenger. Later, it was handed over to the open TON Community, which has been supporting and developing it ever since. TON was designed for lightning-fast transactions, and it’s ultra-cheap, user-friendly, and fully operational.
About The Daily TON
The Daily TON is a Telegram news channel dedicated to delivering the latest news and updates within TON Ecosystem. Covering recent product updates and new releases, we ensure the TON community is always informed with accurate and timely information.
