TON ‘s development roadmap features several intriguing plans, such as stablecoin toolkits, sharding tools, and native bridges for BTC, ETH, and BNB. While no release dates have been announced, we anticipate them to go live in 2024. In this article, we’ll explain the upcoming features, how they’ll impact the network, and whether they’ll alter TON’s staking rewards.
We’ll categorize the most interesting points into three categories to better understand their comprehensive impact. Let’s delve in!
Feeless Transactions
This is the most striking milestone in the TON 2024 roadmap. No other major chain offers feeless transactions, potentially positioning TON to innovate the blockchain space and attract more users from other ecosystems.
In every blockchain, users have to pay gas fees for their transactions. Blockchain protocols cannot waive gas fees as they prevent spam senders from flooding the network with thousands of transactions per second, leading to congestion.
TON may subsidize gas fees for certain cases, such as Telegram wallet or USDT transfers, to encourage more users to use TON for their everyday needs. Imagine being able to send $5 to your friend on Telegram without needing their credit card number or wallet address, and most importantly, it’s free.
Changes in Staking Rewards
1) Separation of Validators and Collators
This is a significant scalability upgrade for TON. Validators are responsible for collecting and validating transactions to form a block. For this, nodes store and continuously monitor the balances of all addresses on the TON blockchain.
TON plans to onboard 500 million Telegram users by 2028 and provide sufficient transaction execution time and low transaction fees using sharding technology. Through sharding, the blockchain is divided into several shard chains. Two shard chains provide double the throughput, four shard chains provide four times the throughput, and so on.
Each shard chain will have its subset of validators to collect and validate blocks. To ensure security, these validators must undergo regular random rotation among subsets. Here arises an issue: validators will have to store the state of each shard, not just their own, during random rotation. Storing the state of one million accounts requires powerful servers, and storing the state of five million accounts in one place is impractical.
To address this, the TON team proposes to separate validation and collection into two roles: Collators may only store the state of their shard chain and collect blocks, while Validators are only assigned to that shard chain for a period to validate and sign blocks. The load and risk will be evenly distributed, allowing TON to scale to meet the needs of billions of users.
Although the validation process becomes more complex, the staking annual percentage yield (APY) for TON won’t change, and Tonstakers’ liquid staking will remain as profitable as it is now.
2) Sharding Guides and Tools
Thanks to diligent developers, TON will be among the first blockchain networks effectively utilizing sharding. Centralized exchanges, payment systems, and even TON’s services and applications require specialized toolkits and documentation to implement sharding support, as it’s a technical area they’re unfamiliar with. That’s why TON developers aim to release such tools in the near future.
3) Penalty Optimization
Penalties serve as a way to punish underperforming validators: missing blocks, frequent offline statuses, or even attempting to include fraudulent transactions in blocks.
Currently, TON uses a complaint mechanism to penalize misbehaving validators. Any network participant can provide evidence and hold bad validators accountable.
Penalty optimization should bring about a better system for detecting and penalizing misbehaving validators, enhancing TON’s robustness. This will be implemented in several steps: first, the liquid staking protocol won’t be affected by validator penalties, ensuring users’ rewards are guaranteed. Then, penalties will be distributed over TON provided by the liquid staking protocol, slightly reducing the average APY.
4) Voter and Configuration Contract Updates
TON’s staking, liquid staking, and on-chain governance are all facilitated through smart contracts. Tonstakers also use these contracts to delegate TON, provide TON to validators, and distribute rewards among our users.
Updates to voter and configuration contracts will allow our users to vote on network proposals, making the network more open and increasing the value for each user.
Decentralized Finance (DeFi)
We’re grouping these changes together because if combined, they’ll have a positive impact on the DeFi ecosystem.
1) TON Stablecoin Toolkit
Besides its name, the document doesn’t elaborate on its specific contents. We can speculate that the stablecoin toolkit will allow anyone to issue algorithmic stablecoins pegged to local fiat currencies, such as GBP, EUR, NZD, and others.
Considering TON’s integration with Telegram, built-in wallet, and the recent decision to share TON’s ad revenue with channel owners, we can assume Telegram might add functionality to pay for in-app services using local stablecoins.
2) Jetton Bridge
TON has already established bridges with Ethereum and BNB chains for bridging $TON and popular tokens like ETH, BNB, and USDC.
The Jetton Bridge will allow users to send TONTokens like tsTON to other chains. Why not add tsTON on Uniswap?
3) Ethereum, BNB, and Bitcoin Bridges
Although we have third-party bridges, it makes sense to launch official bridges for issuing additional currencies.
4) Additional Currencies
$TON is the native token: used for staking and paying gas fees. For example, the functionality code for transacting $TON is built into the TON protocol, and balances are kept in accounts.
Jettons (such as USDT and tsTON) operate through third-party smart contracts and cannot replace $TON for gas fees and staking. Balances are stored in these contracts.
Additional currencies will allow TON users to create tokens similar to native tokens, which will also be stored in accounts. The most significant difference between additional currencies and Jettons is that transactions of additional currencies should be 2-3 times cheaper than Jettons as they occur without contract calls.
Issuing Bitcoin and Ethereum bridged or native USDT-like major tokens as additional currencies will make collaborating with TON more advantageous and attract more new users to use TON. Want to buy Bitcoin, Ethereum, and BNB? TON will offer them on one platform.
Conclusion
TON’s roadmap looks promising, introducing many new tools that will make TON more popular among the masses.
The most impactful updates are native currencies, bridges, and the stablecoin toolkit, which together will expand TON’s utility in everyday payments and allow more people to start building their crypto asset portfolios.
Meanwhile, we Tonstakers are interested in the separation of validators and collectors, penalty optimization, and staking contract updates. The separation and sharding won’t affect the staking APY, and the contract updates will bring more value to liquid staking users as they’ll gain voting rights on TON update proposals.
We’re eagerly anticipating the future TON will bring us in 2024!
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