Who is the ambition of the Telegram blockchain and Libra that will be launched on the main network?

Following Facebook's release of the Libra white paper on the stable currency project this year, another well-known social software Telegram's blockchain system TON (Telegram Open Network) main network will also be launched in November this year.

The two had a dramatic "meeting" after two years of escaping, because Libra was facing a storm challenge and a threat of death due to the parent company's Facebook "leaking privacy"; at the same time, The founding of TON is to protect privacy.

TON's greatest inspiration comes from Telegram. The most famous feature of this well-known encrypted chat software created in 2013 is that users can encrypt and transmit the conversation content. The conversation content is not stored in the cloud, and the user manages it locally, and supports setting the chat record to be destroyed and supported. Delete the account and information. The founder is known for his privacy-oriented attitude and his strong rejection of Russian official requests to submit user encryption keys.

In 2017, foreign media Cointelegraph discovered a video of a suspected Telegram ICO roadshow released by former Telegram employee Anton Rozenberg on Facebook. TON was first exposed. According to Anton Rozenberg, a former employee of Telegram, TON will help people under government oppression to transfer funds locally via SMS; however, the more convincing reason is that TON's token Gram is considered a “no business model community” telegram The source of expansion funding ; in addition, Telegram has a solid blockchain community foundation as a community standard for blockchain projects that are highly decentralized and private.

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Since then, from 2018, whether it is the ICO of up to 1.7 billion US dollars, or the white paper with the fragmentation and multi-chain at that time, it is worthy of people to talk about. In 2019, this blockchain project, which had been focused by many eyes but was once again sold, finally started slowly.

From ICO to IEO

In terms of single exposure, “the debut is the peak” is undoubtedly the best footnote for TON.

At the beginning of 2018, the TON white paper flowed out. According to the first draft of the outflowing white paper, TON plans to raise $1.2 billion, of which $600 million will be offered through invitations in January-February, and is strictly limited to venture capital institutions and founder Durov Brothers. Within the circle of friends; in March began to open the remaining quota for retail investors.

But the enthusiasm for private placement far exceeded expectations.

The swarming investment institutions injected a total of $1.7 billion in financing for TON within two months.

According to public information, these huge sums of money are only from 175 investors. In the first round, the minimum starting amount was 20 million US dollars, and the average price was 0.33 US dollars. The participants included investment institutions such as Sequoia Capital and Benchmark, investors who invested in Facebook, Twitter Yuri Milner, and ebay founder Pierre Omidyar. The round of financing is mainly for qualified professional investors, with a minimum starting amount of US$1 million and an average price of US$1.37. The latest exposure to private equity is the ninth city of Chinese online game operators.

A total of 2.2 billion (44%) of the above private placements were sold. According to the white paper, TON plans to issue a total of 5 billion pieces, and the Telegram team will reserve 2.6 billion pieces to ensure that it is protected from “51%” hacking and 4% left to the development team.

However, in order to circumvent legal issues due to SEC regulation, in April 2018, Telegram announced the cancellation of the lCO for the public.

However, after the private placement, TON's remote main online time is waiting for people to worry, coupled with the enthusiasm of retail investors who failed to "get on the bus", the private-sector shipping in the secondary market began to become popular.

According to official announcements, Gram Token will be officially launched on October 31, 2019. After the TON Network is launched, the current sale of Gram tokens will be released to investors within the next 18 months. Gram's unlocking is divided into 4 phases: the TON network releases 25% after 3 months, releases 25% after 6 months, releases 25% after 12 months, and releases 25% after 18 months.

In June of this year, the cryptocurrency exchange Liquid officially announced that it will exclusively sell the Telegram token Gram in the form of IEO at 8:00 am on July 10. Users can purchase Gram tokens in US dollars or USDC for a token price of 4 USD/ Gram. In fact, the supplier of Gram behind the Liquid Exchange is the largest holder of the token in Asia, Gram Asia.

Also opening the subscription with Liquid is the BiHODL exchange, which is an open GRAM subscription in the form of Initial Gift Offering (IGO) with a subscription price of 0.8 USDT.

These exchanges, which are shipped in the form of IEO and IGO, not only get several times the rate of return in advance, but also invisibly promote their platform coins.

"Fifth Generation Blockchain Technology"

In the third generation of blockchain technology is still popular, founder Pavel Durov defines TON as the fifth generation blockchain to highlight the difference between TON and other projects. In Pavel Durov's view, current blockchain technology The development can be categorized in five generations:

The first generation: single chain, PoW, does not support smart contracts. Examples: Bitcoin (2009) and many imitators (Litecoin, Monero, …).

Second generation: single chain, PoW, smart contract support. For example: Ethereum (2013; deployment in 2015).

Third generation: single chain, PoS, smart contract support. For example: the future of Ethereum (2019 or later).

The third generation: multi-chain, PoS, does not support smart contracts, loose coupling. Example: Bitshares (2013-2014; using DPoS).

The fourth generation: multi-chain, PoS, smart contract support, loose coupling. Examples: EOS (2017; using DPoS), Polkadot (2016; using BFT).

The fifth generation: multi-chain, PoS and BFT, smart contract support, tight coupling, and fragmentation. Example: TON (2017).

In short, the TON blockchain network encompasses all popular technical styles in 2018 and 2019.

Combined with the new white paper of June 2019 and the interpretation of TON project Chinese community organizer & TON Chinese white paper translator Wu Tai Tooz, specifically, TON technical features are as follows:

1. Multi-chain: TON is similar to the recent hot cross-chain projects such as Cosmos and Polkadot, all of which are multi-chain architectures. On the TON, including the heterogeneous multi-chain of the masterchain and the workchain (the working chain can be up to 2 to the power of 92), including the workchain and the shardchain. Construct multiple chains. Among them, Tooz means that the workchain shares the verification node with the masterchain.

2. Fragmentation: The white paper shows that in the TON system, the workchain is not the smallest unit, it can be subdivided into 2 64-segment fragment chains, all of which are homogeneous multi-chain. Compared to two recent shards such as ELRON and ONE, the Tooz believes that the former is just a single-digit static segmentation, while TON's vision is to do unlimited sharding and can become too high in load. Automatically slice or automatically merge. In the updated version of the white paper, a technique called "instant hypercube routing" was introduced, which "is designed to ensure that transactions can be processed quickly, despite the sheer size of the system."

3. Tight coupling: This refers to the tight coupling between the workchain and the shardchain. Tooz said that tight coupling is highly dependent on the relevance of the module, and the ability to handle transactions in the system is also high. Therefore, under the premise of fragmentation, it is meaningful to be tightly coupled to the blockchain. EOS and Polkadot are loosely coupled because they don't have shards. ETH 2.0 is a good example of tight coupling.

4. PoS+BFT: The consensus algorithm adopted by TON is no different from Cosmos and Polkadot. According to the white paper, the node does not need permission, and only requires a certain amount of tokens and common IT operation and maintenance capabilities. There are four roles in the TON network: Validator, Nominator, Fisherman, Collator, and malicious verifiers will be punished by slash; in addition, BFT consensus mechanism blessing Ensure that the consensus does not branch, and is more suitable for a "closely coupled" multi-chain architecture.

5. Anonymous protection of account privacy (this is important): One of the components of the TON blockchain, TON Proxy (network proxy/anonymous layer), is used to hide identity and create a decentralized virtual private network (VPN) to protect online privacy.

6. Smart Contract (New Language Fift): In May 2019, co-founder Nikolai Durov published a new language called Fift on May 23. This language is designed to develop and manage TON blockchain smart contracts and interact with TON Virtual Machines (TVMs). In turn, TVM executes smart contract code in the TON blockchain, supports all the operations needed to parse incoming and persistent data, and creates new and modified persistent data. Tooz says its role is similar to Libra's Move.

Looking back at the progress of TON, TON is making steady progress. In the fall of 2018, it was revealed that 70% of TON was ready and 95% of virtual machines were ready; in April 2019, Russian business newspaper Vedomosti reported that Telegram had authorized a limited number of developers in the world to use the TON beta. The article mentioned that the test may take three to four months to half a year, which means that TON may be released in the second half of 2019. In May, Telegram officially released TON's test client TON Testnet Blockchain Lite. Beginning in July, several exchanges have been launched on Gram. However, Tooz also said that it was not in stock before the main online line.

Compare Facebook with Telegram

Since the birth of Libra, there have been many discussions about Libra and other blockchain tokens. In fact, the most interesting difference between Libra and TON is that both have a large user base, but the former has been greatly questioned because of privacy, while the latter has gained a lot of support because of privacy.

In fact, if you sort out the difference between the two, you can get the following table:

I. Management organization

Libra has established an internal governance body, the Libra Association. In the introduction of the white paper, the rights of the association are restricted. The association does not formulate monetary policy. On the other hand, the association has the final decision-making power. Two-thirds of the members need to vote and agree on major decisions or technical decisions. As of June 2019, when the Libra White Paper was released, there were 28 founding members. Among the 28 founding members, non-profit organizations accounted for 14.3%, and for-profit institutions accounted for 85.7%. However, official documents indicate that it will be committed to “non-central control” and “gradual open participation network”, with the aim of finally implementing a truly decentralized transaction within five years of public release.

In contrast, TON is managed by the TON Foundation. According to the TON white paper, in order to prevent centralization, the TON Foundation will never try to make Grams on its account more than 10% of the total tokens. The Foundation will use this part. Develop or deploy TON projects or encourage developers. The white paper believes that in the development of the TON system, the Foundation will control most of the nodes and master most of the votes in the governance, determine the adjustment of parameters or the upgrade of the main network, but with the decentralization of the token, the situation Will gradually improve.

Second, the degree of decentralization

Libra is essentially a licensed chain of alliances in which each node controls a node and becomes a verifier node and a member of the founding association, meeting technical requirements and specific evaluation criteria. The participating companies or institutions must first invest in Libra with an investment amount of $10 million libra. Non-profit organizations will not need to make initial investments. However, they also have to pay for the cost of running their nodes. It is estimated that the cost of running a verification node is approximately $280,000.

In contrast, TON is more like a public chain without a license. Nodes can join and leave the network at any time, and can join and quit the network at will. However, because it is a PoS mechanism, the verification node needs to have a certain number of token thresholds and a slightly lower threshold for the web server.

Third, token supply & distribution

Libra is a stable currency anchored to the US dollar. Its reserve is part of the cash, part of the deposit, and the rest is the short-term national debt of the quality country. The total amount is uncertain and supports the destruction or issuance.

In contrast, Gram is a non-stable currency of PoS, initially at 5 billion, with an additional 2% per annum; and in the private placement phase, GRAM is sold under continuous curve rules, ranging in price from $0.1 to $1; waiting until the main online After the line, the token can unlock the free trade.

Fourth, the main target & user scale

Libra's mission is “to achieve a simple global monetary and financial infrastructure that empowers billions of people” with the goal of creating a global digital currency and infrastructure for domestic and international financial transactions based on a friendly mobile interface. A group of users is Facebook's 2.4 billion users, as well as alliance members including Visa and Lyft, and the market prospect is broad.

In contrast, Gram acts as a native token in the TON blockchain system, and its role is even more geek. In addition to being available for transactions, its uses include: paying the gas fee for the TON network, ie for transferring funds and calling smart contracts; pledge tokens, for voting nodes, obtaining bonus awards, voting system proposals; TON Services payment methods; The TON Proxy agent hides the means of payment for identity and IP address. The first users were also tens of millions of users that Telegram had accumulated.

V. Technical characteristics

Libra's "blockchain" is not based on blocks because it stores transactions in a sequence of Merkle tree structures whose hashes are authenticated in a traditional blockchain fashion, which will generate a distributed versioned database. Its ledger status changes after each transaction. Libra defines its consensus model as a variant of the HotStuff protocol and marks it as LibraBFT. The smart contract language is Move.

In contrast, TON includes a main chain and several work chains. Each work chain can have different consensus mechanisms, and each work chain has its own sub-blockchain. The entire system can be automatically split and merged to accommodate the transaction load under the "infinite segmentation paradigm". These multiple independent blockchains can be coordinated through an intelligent routing mechanism called “instant hypercube routing”. In addition, a unique technical feature of TON is its “self-healing” mechanism, not only The invalid shardchain block can be fixed; in addition, the “fisherman” in the consensus mechanism also encourages the role of supervision by indicating the error of the verifier to obtain the reward. The smart contract language is Fift.

Despite this, the two face the same problem – regulation. The Libra hearing, which was held not long ago, proves that Libra, which was dragged down by Facebook's trust crisis, will not be able to issue money until the US legislator's concerns are resolved.

Similarly, Telegram was also murdered by Russia because of the refusal to provide the Russian official with a user key. Before taking off the hat of the hotbed of terrorism, Telegram has become more legal in the country.

Reference materials:

1. TON.pdf (English version);

2, a text first familiar with the hard-core Telegram (telegram) Chinese version of the white paper, Tooz;

3. Libra, TON and JPMorgan Coin Compared: Are They Heroes or Villains?, Daniele Pozzi;

4, CoinBene full currency online dialogue TON Chinese community Wu Tai: Telegram's first post-business supervision has more opportunities than libra, CoinBene;

5, the new version of the white paper in English, Telegram token GRAM public sales began in July, privately raised $ 1.7 billion TON ecology is almost complete, block rhythm.

Text | Aloe

Produced | Odaily Planet Daily (ID: o-daily)

Original article; unauthorized reprinting is strictly prohibited, and violation of the law will be investigated.

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