The TON blockchain is one of the most significant advancements in the blockchain industry over the past few years, demonstrating quite a number of features that allow it to stand out among its competitors. In this material, we will explore six features of the TON blockchain that make it quite unique, especially in regards to its programming.
The Smart Contract Aspect
The classic concept of the blockchain entails the user paying a commission fee for the transaction. This concept was introduced in the form of the gas fee in the Ethereum network and essentially mimics the mechanics of a classical bank, which charges a commission for its services. The same applies to a blockchain. This, in turn, results in a low level of scalability, since many miners will be involved in maintaining the network, thus entailing large costs for servicing an ever-increasing amount of equipment. This will also result in an unfair distribution of commission fees and the internal economy of the blockchain will eventually collapse under the effects of rising costs.
The TON blockchain applies a different method for paying for smart contract processing. The concept is unique for blockchain space, as it relieves the fees from the users and levies them onto the app developer instead. The TON blockchain foresees a certain amount of native TON tokens reserved under each smart contract, which is used to pay for transaction processing. Should a smart contract run out of funds on the balance, it will be deleted, but will be recovered over time. The period of time needed to store the data to be sent is thus proportional to the amount of the fee used. The developer of the blockchain thus pays for the transactions and this makes the network far more scalable.
Asynchronous Smart Contract Calls
The standard process of a transaction call in a classical blockchain is atomic. This means it implies seamless composability and requires the enabling of all steps in the transaction process. Should any of the steps fail, the transaction will fail as well. The backend of the transaction is thus stored on a single server and the process has to be synchronous to run and access every part of the smart contract.
The difference of the TON blockchain’s approach to smart contract processing is that its processes are fragmented into microservices and can thus run on different servers. The smart contracts can communicate over different servers and are thus asynchronous, as the process can take some time. If the process is to be broken down into a more comprehensible pattern, it would mean that when a smart contract calls a method of a different smart contract, the call will be processed after the transaction terminates, perhaps on some different future block.
No Immutability of Smart Contract Code
The basic concept of the blockchain implies that all information stored on it is immutable by default. The concept can be easily proven by the Ethereum blockchain, which leverages the immutability feature to give various projects the ability to offer a variety of services, such as logistics tracking, legal document storage and processing, and many others.
The TON blockchain is different in this regard, as it has done away with immutability altogether and allows developers to modify smart contract code freely. Code can be written as a variable, making it subject to changes even after it has been processed.
Data Structuring
The classical Ethereum structure of data is quite susceptible to hacker attack, since the user pays a fee for the data they enter into the blockchain. In essence, the only thing a hacker will need to do is pay a high cost for their spam to enter the system and add more entities into the smart contract to corrupt it. The only thing stopping attackers from doing that is the high cost involved, as it would not be economically viable.
The TON blockchain has no protection against spam either, but it does have some embedded mechanisms that prevent such attacks from happening. By implementing a tree-like structure of data divided to 1023 bit chunks called ‘cells’. If an attacker were to spam keys in the map, some user balances would be pushed so low in the tree that updating them would pass the gas limit. In essence, this is reminiscent of smart contract sharding.
Multiple Wallets to One Public Key
The classical blockchain, like Ethereum, foresees one unique wallet address prescribed to one public key. This essentially makes each wallet an identifier of the user holding it. The same does not apply to the TON blockchain, where wallets are not implied, but are independent smart contracts that must be deployed like any other smart contract.
Basically, this means that users can have many wallets deployed at the same time, with each wallet having a unique address, all bound to a single private key. The only thing that differs is the code of the wallet, meaning users have to remember the wallet address details to access it via the key. Such an approach opens multiple opportunities for the deployment of multisig wallets and other applications.
Conclusion
The TON blockchain is a unique combination of technology and software solutions that surpass many of the networks currently available in terms of flexibility and versatility. On the scalability level, the TON blockchain is also more economically feasible and allows the concept of the blockchain to expand almost indefinitely in terms of storage space, opening up many opportunities for developers and users alike.
