The TON Foundation, an organization responsible for the blockchain project initiated by Telegram, the TON blockchain network, ad officially on Tuesday that TON miners have mined the last Toncoin.
“Tens of thousands of miners have mined the entire Toncoin issue, which was about 5 billion tokens,” said Anatoly Makosov, founding member of the TON Foundation and lead developer, in a statement to Cointelegraph. The last token was mined on June 28, he noted.
The end of Toncoin mining marks a major milestone in TON distribution, ushering in its new era as a fully PoS-based blockchain. From now on, new toncoin tokens will only enter circulation through PoS validation, the foundation said. This will cut the total inflow of new tokens to the network by around 75% down to the existing limit of 200,000 tokens per day.
The TON price has immediately reacted to the news, rising 34% in the last 24 hours. The token is trading at $1.41, according to data from CoinGecko.
By definition, Proof-of-Stake, or PoS for short, is a consensus algorithm that works based on the participation of a validator in the network. The PoS algorithm is opposed to Proof-of-Work, or PoW, the original consensus algorithm of major cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH), based on validated blocks through the computing power provided by miners. .
According to TON’s whitepaper, its blockchain uses a PoS approach to generate new blocks. Nevertheless, its unique infrastructure allows miners to generate Toncoins using PoW consensus as well, Makosov stated:
“The TON blockchain has always been Proof-of-Stake; the novelty is that even on a PoS blockchain it is possible to write a smart contract that can be mined according to PoW principles.”
“If you put the entire coin issuance of the blockchain into such a smart contract, you get a PoS blockchain, but with a distribution of coins in the form of mining. As far as we know, no one has done this before”added the developer.
According to Makosov, the current TON network was launched on November 15, 2019, while the coin issue was placed in smart contracts that could be mined on July 7, 2020. The tokens were placed in special “giver” smart contracts, which allowed anyone to participate in mining. “Users mined around 200,000 TON daily,” reads an official post dedicated to the history of TON mining.
“Mining on the TON blockchain was a unique phenomenon to behold,” notes the post, adding that mining in TON began “spontaneously and randomly” after the Telegram team reached a settlement with the US Securities and Exchange Commission and was forced to end its involvement in the development of TON.
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