- The project achieved this feat after conducting consecutive validator contests in Q3, 2020.
- Free TON has more than 400 validators and 15 fully-developed geographical sub-governances.
- Per TON Labs’ CTO, decentralisation will also depend on the number of issued tokens.
The Free TON project, a community-operated blockchain network that came to be after a fork of Telegram’s attempt to launch a blockchain, has announced the launch of a mainnet. A report unveiled this news on December 22, noting that the announcement was a formality, seeing as there wasn’t a network launch. Reportedly, the project’s developers chose a date to mark ample decentralisation of the network and an effective mainnet start.
According to the report, the Free TON community held a livestream ceremony to commemorate this milestone. The ceremony, allegedly, featured a Declaration of decentralisation in the blockchain network, which anyone can sign. To reach this feat, the community held consecutive validator contests over four weeks in Q3, 2020. These contests tested the capability of validators across the globe by evaluating their performance under pressure.
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At the end of the contest, Free TON managed to get more than 400 validators, which made the project declare that it had achieved sufficient decentralisation. Apart from the validators, Free TON also has 15 fully-developed geographical sub governances, which help form the project’s iteration of a decentralised autonomous organization (DAO).
Per Mitja Goroshevskiy, TON Labs’ chief technology officer, sufficient decentralisation will also be determined by the number of tokens the project distributes. While the project is yet to achieve this feat because it still has a lot of tokens to distribute, Goroshevskiy believes that the process is mature enough to render the network decentralised.
A leading decentralised PoS network
Free TON went live on May 7 this year as a community-driven decentralised blockchain network. The project does not have a centralised organization, and it launched without funding, seeing as it did not conduct an ICO or a token sale. The project’s native coin, TON Crystal, is distributed on merit. This means community members have to make small contributions to the network to get TON Crystals.
The Free Ton community also open-sourced a new validator node written in Rust. According to the team, the new node has higher performance and lower latency than the original one, which was written in C++. Per Goroshevskiy, the team slowed down the new node on purpose for it to work seamlessly with existing clients. However, it is not yet ready for launch.
This news comes after Telegram shut down its TON testnet in July this year, leaving independent projects to carry on with this project. The firm’s CEO, Pavel Durov, announced that it had opted to cut its support for the Telegram Open Network (TON) after a legal battle with the US Securities Exchange Commission, which claimed Telegram’s £1.27 billion IPO was an unregistered securities sale.
