The origin and development of TON (The Open Network) is dramatic, starting from the ambition of the giant Telegram, going through regulatory setbacks, and ultimately being revived by the community, becoming one of the fastest-growing public chains today. Below is a summary of its key stages:

I. Founding and Ambition (2017-2019)

1. Telegram's Ambition

- In 2017, Telegram founder Pavel Durov and Nikolai Durov proposed the Telegram Open Network (TON), aiming to build a high-performance blockchain supporting hundreds of millions of users, solving the problems of slow transactions, high costs, and scalability in traditional public chains.

- In 2018, Telegram raised $1.7 billion through an ICO, setting a record at the time, with investors including top venture capital firms.

- In terms of technical design, TON uses a dynamic sharding architecture (main chain + working chains + shard chains), theoretically supporting millions of transactions per second, far exceeding Solana during the same period (60,000 transactions/second).

2. Early Development and Regulatory Crisis

- In 2019, the TON test network went live, introducing sharding technology to validate scalability.

- In the same year, the U.S. SEC accused its token Gram of being an 'unregistered security', forcing Telegram to terminate the project, refunding 72% of the investment and paying $18.5 million in settlement.

II. Community Takeover and Rebirth (2020-2022)

1. Open Source and Community Transformation

- In 2020, Telegram opened the TON code to the public, transferring the project to an independent developer community, renaming it as 'The Open Network' (TON), and renaming the token to Toncoin (TON).

- The community completed token distribution through PoW mining: 98.55% of TON was mined by miners, with the team retaining only 1.45%.

- In 2021, the TON Foundation was officially established, led by former VK (Russian social platform) engineers.

2. Technical Consensus Transformation

- In June 2022, the initial 5 billion TON tokens were fully mined, and the consensus mechanism shifted from PoW to PoS, with an annual inflation rate of 0.6% used to incentivize validators.

- The foundation froze 21% of inactive early tokens (171 wallets) to optimize the token concentration issue.

III. Telegram's Return and Ecological Explosion (2023 to Present)

1. Official Deep Binding

- In 2023, Telegram announced the integration of TON as the official Web3 infrastructure into the App interface, supporting wallet, payment, and other functions.

- In February 2024, Telegram channel transactions and advertising payments exclusively used the TON chain and Toncoin.

2. Ecological Exponential Growth

- User and Capital Influx: Backed by Telegram's 900 million monthly active users, the number of daily active addresses on the TON chain once surpassed Ethereum.

- TVL Surge: Increased from $9.56 million in 2023 to $750 million on July 7, 2024 (an increase of nearly 80 times), ranking tenth among public chains.

- DApp Ecosystem: The number of applications increased from 0 to over 900, covering GameFi, payments, social, etc., with hit games like Notcoin (35 million users) and Hamster Kombat (230 million users).

- Token Performance: The price of TON rose from $2 at the beginning of 2024 to over $7.5, with an annual return rate exceeding 270%, and a market cap surpassing $18 billion, ranking in the top ten cryptocurrencies.

IV. Continuation and Innovation of Technical Architecture

- Continuation of Sharding Design: Retaining the original multi-chain architecture (main chain coordination + working chain processing + shard chains parallel), supporting cross-chain communication.

- Consensus Mechanism Upgrade: Adopting Catchain (BFT-PoS Hybrid Consensus), enhancing security and efficiency through multiple rounds of voting.

- Smart Contract Features:

- Using self-developed languages FunC/Tact (not Solidity), asynchronous calls enhance scalability but increase development complexity.

- Actor Model: Each account is an independent shard chain, with resources paid for (contracts need to hold TON to pay fees).

Summary: The Paradigm from Stillborn to Rebirth

TON's unique journey reveals how community power can save giant projects:

- The regulatory crisis forced Telegram to withdraw but gave rise to a more decentralized governance model;

- The traffic support from Telegram became the core engine for ecological explosion, validating the feasibility of 'social + blockchain';

- High Technical Starting Point (sharding, asynchronous processing) maintains its performance advantage, laying the foundation for large-scale applications.

The current goal of TON is to attract 500 million on-chain users by 2028, becoming a representative of inclusive infrastructure in Web3. Its development confirms the key roles of resilience, adaptability, and ecological synergy in blockchain projects.