Telegram’s TON network suffers from its ‘success,’ scales down to 1TPS

The Open Network (TON), formerly known as Telegram Open Network, has suffered a significant slowdown following a surge in activity that some have attributed to the launch of ‘inscriptions’ on TON.

The TON Foundation released a ‘Technical Incident Report,’ which attempts to describe what occurred, attributing the slowdown to “over 3 million new transactions.”

TonStat, a website that provides TON data, currently shows approximately 2 million transactions on December 5 and an additional 800k on December 6. This was a significant increase from the approximately 266k transactions on December 4.

The TON20 inscription similar to BRC20 caused the TON blockchain to generate more than 2 million transactions in half an hour, and the network usage increased by 61x. The TON network was severely congested and verification was delayed. Major wallets have temporarily suspended the…
— Wu Blockchain (@WuBlockchain) December 7, 2023

The marketing around TON has significantly focused on its ability to manage significant amounts of transactions, including claiming to have set the ‘TPS world record’ and claiming that “TON can handle millions of transactions per second.” It continues to reiterate these claims, claiming in this update that “TON is the most scalable and fastest blockchain in the world.”

The obvious question then is why the blockchain is not living up to those claims, and the TON Foundation shifts that blame on validators, claiming that they are “running on weak hardware.”

In response to this immediate problem, the TON Foundation has issued a new version of validator software, which appears to focus on increasing timeouts and managing larger queues.

However, the network appears to have deeper issues that cannot be corrected this easily. The TON Foundation seems to believe that it will be able to convince validators to upgrade to sufficient hardware if they change the “system of decentralized penalties for validators who do their job poorly or incorrectly,” because currently, the “penalties are too kind.”

However, the other problem is that the transaction fee on TON is fixed, which means they will not scale when demands go up. However, the TON Foundation doesn’t think this is an important change because it insists that “with the target hardware at validators, there will be no problems with the current fixed low commissions.”

Telegram Group and TON Issuer previously had to return over $1 billion to investors and pay a $18.5 million fine to the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2020 due to their token offering.

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