TON Blockchain Faces Challenges

The Open Network (TON), previously referred to as the Telegram Open Network, has encountered a substantial deceleration after a surge in activity that specific individuals have attributed to the introduction of ‘inscriptions’ on TON.

A “Technical Incident Report” was published by the TON Foundation to explain what transpired; it attributes the sluggishness to “more than three million new transactions.”

Presently, the website TonStat, which offers The Open Network data, indicates that there were around 2 million transactions on December 5th, with an additional 800k occurring on December 6th.

The volume of transactions witnessed a substantial surge, surpassing the estimated 266k transactions recorded on December 4.

The marketing for The Open Network has placed considerable emphasis on its capacity to process large volumes of transactions, even going so far as to claim the title of “TPS world record holder” and asserting that “TON can process millions of transactions per second.”

It maintains these assertions, stating in this update that “TON is the world’s most scalable and quickest blockchain.”

Why, then, does the blockchain fail to live up to these claims? In response, the TON Foundation attributes this failure to validators, which it describes as “operating on shoddy hardware.”

The TON Foundation has issued a new version of validator software in response to this immediate issue; the software’s apparent improvements include an increase in timeouts and the management of more significant delays.

Nonetheless, the network appears to have more fundamental problems that cannot be resolved now.

Because the “penalties are too lenient” at present, the The Open Network Foundation believes that modifying the “system of decentralized penalties for validators who perform their duties improperly or inadequately” will persuade validators to upgrade to more suitable hardware.

The second issue, however, is that TON’s transaction fees are fixed, meaning they do not scale with increased demand.

Nevertheless, the The Open Network Foundation maintains that “with the target hardware at validators, there will be no issues with the current fixed low commissions” and, therefore, does not consider this a significant change.

Due to their token offering in 2020, Telegram Group and TON Issuer were previously required to return more than $1 billion to investors and pay a $18.5 million punishment to the Securities and Exchange Commission.