While you were enjoying eating salad with your family, I decided to prepare a great post for you in the morning so you can start the new year with something healthy while sipping your mineral water.

[Tal Kol](https://twitter.com/koltal), the founder at [Orbs](https://www.orbs.com/), is a very smart man with a lot of experience with apps, users and development. He has been an entrepreneur all his life.

Kol is interested in infrastructure projects for users and has always thought about mass adoption of blockchain applications, which is how Orbs came to be. All of his early years at Orbs were centered around Ethereum. In interviews, he keeps referring to Ethereum as a technologically complex tool that will never be embraced by people. “Ethereum is not a blockchain for mass adoption. My mom will never use it,” he says.

When Telegram posted a White Paper in 2018 he saw that Nikolai Durov's concept was very similar to what he was promoting. TON shines new colors in his eyes, and in 2021, when he saw that Telegram had staked on it, he began to participate in the ecosystem.

It came as a surprise to me when he said that the Ethereum code is centralized, and that its code is run by a corporation (I didn't know). “Ethereum, Google or Uber won't let you do a fork of their services, their code is closed, but TON, on the contrary, is as open as possible and makes an honest platform with a concern for users' interests. Not because it makes more money, but because people need it. After all, if TON becomes a bad blockchain or users see that the project is developing the wrong way, people will just do a fork and be a better version," says Kol.

A little earlier [Tolya Yanot](https://github.com/tolya-yanot) wrote that TON will overtake Ethereum in the number of active users, Kol says similarly: “Ethereum or Solana. None of them have a chance to compete with TON in terms of mass adoption. We’ll catch up to them in terms of the number of users. I'm not worried, it won't take long.”

He goes on to give an example in which blockchain trumps centralization. “The big problem with all centralized systems, without blockchain, is that I build, say, a product or application system, and you are my user. I build a Google search, and you want to search on my platform. I build an Uber, you want a ride on my platform. When they tell you how the platform works, they make you certain promises, like I will send a car to you very quickly and write how long it will take. You don't know how it works, but you have to trust them. And they have an incentive to deceive you. Why? Because they’re making money off you. But you’re not part of the ecosystem. You are the product, you are the customer. You’re not a stakeholder, nobody cares about you. And what web3 and blockchain allow us to do is create products that give assurances to users. So, for example, if I want to create a search and I can demonstrate that the search results are not manipulated. So, on blockchain, we can create products that give guarantees to end users about certain aspects of those products. And it keeps the integrity of the system, kind of bypassing governance,” says Kol.

He also mentions people coming out of VK and Telegram. “These people understand what mass affinity is. They know how to reach a billion users, unlike Ethereum.”

And lastly, he has some very wise words. “You know, there’s more to what we do than just writing code. We’re trying to create a movement, and in order to create a movement, the best way to have the biggest impact is to inspire other people to go in the same direction. I want you to be a part of TON and not because I’m going to make money from TON, but because we want to build something bigger than ourselves. Ultimately, TON will become a better ecosystem for users.”

Thank you to the TON&Co team for the interview. It was helpful and interesting.

For the full video interview see [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkMk6IUm6Cg&list=PL8nfJTMR2BSAFA4hG8GOqlYeqW0lX-NNd).  

Vudi is the author of a channel about TON [@investkingyru_en](https://t.me/investkingyru_en) and an active participant in the TON ecosystem. He is also the founder of the blockchain collection kingyTON, based on the historical events of the TON project [ton.org.in](https://ton.org.in/). If you find errors in this post, please let Vudi know on Telegram [@kingyru](https://t.me/kingyru).


Understanding what mass affinity is and how to reach a billion users

In August 2022, there was an interview with one of the developers of the TON DNS smart contract, Anatoly Makosov (tolya
yanot), which is still relevant today. However, a lot has changed since then, including the launch of the Telegram
username auctions — [Fragment](https://fragment.com).

### What are TON DNS and Telegram Username now?

TON DNS turned out great: it's well thought-through, well-designed and implemented. It's also the most multifaceted
component of those launched previously, as it covers usernames for wallets, domains and subdomains for TON sites, NFT
and partial burning of Toncoin emission.

In late October, the Telegram team released a username auction based on the TON blockchain. It is based on the same TON
DNS contract.

### Why was it decided to burn TONs paid for domains, and not to increase staking percentage?

The percentage of staking is directly related to the reward of the network validators. Validators are rewarded for
keeping the network running. The more users and transactions, the more work the validators get, the greater reward they
receive. This is what the tokenomics of the network is built on, and introducing new rules and relationships (such as
validators receiving undeserved revenue from DNS auctions as well) is not a good idea. If there’s a need to increase
validators' reward, it would be better to do so by putting forward the proposal to increase network rewards, and having
the community decide by vote.

The DNS auction is made as decentralized and open as possible.

Coins from the initial sale of domains, to be precise, are not burned, but remain forever on the auction's smart
contracts and are permanently removed from circulation. However, it’s easier to use the words “burn” and “burning” here.

If the funds from the initial sale of the domains had not been burned, several problems would arise:

- Who would control the proceeds? You would have to create some sort of TON DNS DAO, identify the people who would be a
  part of it, the format of their work, etc.
- These people would be able to take any domains, just by making huge bids on them, because at the end of the auction
  funds will fall into their own hands anyway.

Therefore, this option was set aside. Now the conditions for obtaining domains are equal for all: core-team participates
in auctions on the same terms as other users.

Coins go out of circulation, and that always has a positive effect on tokenomics. You may argue that at the moment ~600k
TON worth of domains have been sold, and that is insignificant in the context of all available coins out there, but this
auction will stay forever, and a very significant amount of coins may be burned during the whole time.

Some argue that it would be better to spend the proceeds from the domain sale on registering the .ton zone with ICANN.
This way, the sites would become available both at ton://dubai.ton and at [http://dubai.ton](http://dubai.ton). They are
already working in this direction and I hope they can do it. It's worth noting that the ICANN registration fee is paid
in U.S. dollars, not Toncoin.

### Why did Telegram take a different approach?

Pavel Durov often says that he does not have enough money to support Telegram, and until recently, he supported
everything with his own funds. Then came the paid Telegram Premium subscription, and now anyone can auction off their
username.

I believe that Telegram deserves to use the Toncoins it receives for selling Telegram usernames.

### There is a lot of controversy in the community about domains being too expensive, why is it so?

Domains like "life" or "casino" in the usual centralized DNS registries are not cheap either. In fact, they will cost
much more than $1000 there.

If there wasn’t a minimum price for a domain, cybersquatters would quickly register all the domains with the help of
automatic bots at little cost. That is why the starting minimum price depends on the number of letters — without the
minimum price, you could, for example, register absolutely all 4-letter domains (26^4 = ~457 thousand) for only a few
tens of thousands of TON.

The TON community is constantly growing. Setting a minimum price is fair to people who will come to TON later and learn
about domains later.

It is worth noting that the minimum price decreases over time and in the end, even 4-letter domains will start at 100
TON.

The reputation of the Telegram messenger also suggests that 4-letter usernames can cost $10,000, and even 1.5M TON as
time shows.

### Who developed the TON DNS contracts?

Kirill Emelianenko and Anatoly Makosov are the ones who make the important Roadmap smart contracts.

They are quite paranoid about reviewing contracts and testing them. Almost all system contracts have a very high cost of
failure, so it's a lot of work.

All the contracts are open source, there's a Bug Bounty program, which means that the community does the audit as well.

This year, a number of well-known companies that specialize in finding bugs and vulnerabilities in smart contracts tuned
in.

### How can I make sure that the DNS and Usernames smart contracts are good?

The smart contracts code is open and available on GitHub, and anyone can view it. For non-technical people, probably the
main criterion is that everything works.

Telegram published a smart contract hack contest on Oct. 22 with a $100,000 prize. No one has cracked it.

### How would you comment on the words of Nikolay Durov "In most cases, the persistent data of a TON DNS Resolver smart contract contains a prefix dictionary with keys equal to the defined subdomain names (with terminating zero byte) and values equal to a (HashmapE 16 ^DNSRecord)...". Why didn't you follow this scenario?

The records are stored that way, but the key size was increased from 16-bit to 256-bit to comply with
the [Token Data Standard](https://github.com/ton-blockchain/TIPs/issues/64) and to allow different projects to simply
take arbitrary strings as a key instead of coordinating the keys with each other.

For example, the Disintar Marketplace could store some of its information in user domains with the key "disintar_info"
and it would definitely not overlap with other projects.

### Have you thought that when there will be a full-fledged implementation of TON Sites, TON Proxy, ADNL, a lot can change? And we already have DNS contracts written. Also, in the case of any vulnerability in the child DNS contracts, the fix is likely to be impossible on the existing domains (also with NFT, tokens, etc).

Of course, everything is calculated several steps ahead.

A lot of attention is paid to revision and testing of the underlying code. The network is stable and applications don't
send [private keys to the backend like](https://twitter.com/Blokchainaholic/status/1555010999383883777) in Solana. To
date, there have been no real hacks in TON, neither in the kernel nor in the core applications and services.
The [Bug Bounty](https://github.com/ton-blockchain/bug-bounty) program plays an important role.

For over a year and a half now, the team has been actively producing systematic releases, and has maintained a pace of
several global (such as TON DNS and TON Payments) releases per quarter, on top of all other work. In fact, the pace is
even faster. For example, this quarter (Q3) they also plan to [launch the NFT bridge](https://t.me/tonblockchain/146)
and token bridge, which were not included in the original roadmap. These are complex and non-trivial tasks, 90 days is a
very short time to implement them. However, the team produces stable, well working solutions. If we consider not only
the system releases, but the entire ecosystem, then news, updates or launches happen almost every day.

TON Foundation and independent development teams in TON work extremely efficiently and professionally.

### The smart contract allows validators to remove or take away domains. What will happen to domains like “coinbase” or “binance”? What if the TON Foundation needs it for important tasks or purposes?

TON Foundation members buy domains on the same terms as all other users. Various exchanges, too.

In exceptional cases it’s possible to change the owner or delete a specific domain by voting. Technically, the majority
of votes on the network can change not only the DNS, but any configuration of the blockchain.

DNS will run forever, so it was important to include this possibility in the smart contract, but there is no specific
case where it can be applied. There must be some good reason for everyone to vote.

---

Thanks to the TON Foundation for open communication and answering questions.

Vudi is the author of a channel about TON [@investkingyru_en](https://t.me/investkingyru_en) and an active participant
in the TON ecosystem. He is also the founder of the blockchain collection kingyTON, based on the historical events of
the TON project [ton.org.in](https://ton.org.in). If you find errors in this post, please let Vudi know on
Telegram [@kingyru](https://t.me/kingyru).


Interview with the developer: What are TON DNS and Telegram Username now?

# Opinion - Against freezing inactive accounts of the first miners

TON users and investors are awaiting the vote on whether to freeze wallets belonging to the first miners of the network for 48 months. These wallets contain a total of 1,081,425,847 TON coins. I first became aware of this from the [testnet code](https://t.me/investkingyru/851) of the official TON Blockchain repository, before it was later announced by the TON Core Dev team as a proposal that requires a vote.

## What is the freeze for?

Investors who look into TON are immediately faced with the question – where is 96% of the TON coin supply? Who has it? There are no answers as of yet. When TON first appeared on [CoinMarketCap](https://coinmarketcap.com), it only occupied the +250th place in market cap because this missing TON was not circulating. This ranking was based upon the actively circulating TON in the network which, at that time, was a small fraction of the total.

Today, TON is in the top 30 on CoinMarketCap on the understanding that 1,221,401,181 TON out of the total 5,047,558,528 TON issued are circulating amongst active wallets.

## What does the freeze risk?

If the vote supports making changes to the TON mainnet, the introduction of these norms would create a bad precedent, particularly with respect to decentralization, the empowerment of the people, and the Web3 vision. Contrary to these tenets, a select group of people would be able to block any user.

Recently, Pavel Durov, in his address regarding the launch of the [Fragment](https://fragment.com) platform said that we should strive for decentralization and the transfer of power to the people through blockchain technology. But now we are planning to suspend some of the first miners, and it is unclear why. Huge Bitcoin wallets have been holding their reserves for 10 years now and no one is regulating them. How does simply putting the issue to a vote distinguish a decentralized blockchain from a centralized bank, especially given that voting will be done by major TON owners who also happen to be among the first miners?

The current group of active first miners could, with the amount of TON coin at their disposal, build a network of validators in 48 months and earn even more TON.

## Voting is meaningless.

For a long time, voting has not been a decentralized solution in the TON network because of the large number of controlled validators.

Take, for example, the vote regarding DNS domains and the integration of .t.me domains. After the initial announcement, a ‘vote’ was confidently held among validators and the configuration of these domains was changed.

Based on this, it is highly likely that a validator vote will result in a decision to freeze the wallets, without any influence from the wider community, because it is beneficial for TON Foundation and large holders.

## The freeze would set a precedent.

If we consider the consequences of the freeze, then the reduction in liquidity may attract new investors but, on the other hand, the centralized control of frozen addresses may scare off other investors because of the perception that their address could be frozen at any time.

This is a precedent that would undermine any future guarantees. If a mechanism for blocking addresses is added, it would make it much easier to use again in the future and no one would be immune from being blocked. Amongst the early miners, there may well be a real person who forgot about TON, will find his seed phrase in a year or two, and then find out that he has been blocked on the blockchain.

---

*Vudi is the author of a channel about TON [@investkingyru_en](https://t.me/investkingyru_en) and an active participant in the TON ecosystem. He is also the founder of the blockchain collection kingyTON, based on the historical events of the TON project [ton.org.in](https://ton.org.in). If you find errors in this post, please let Vudi know on Telegram [@kingyru](https://t.me/kingyru).*


Vudi Kingyru