The biggest and most anticipated TON Virtual Machine (TVM) update is finally here! On June 5, 2023, we published an article announcing the launch of this TVM update on Testnet. At the same time, we launched the TVM Challenge, a contest focused on discovering innovative use cases and features for TVM, with a total prize pool of 30,000 Toncoin.

After more than six months of intensive testing, dozens of completed bug bounties, and audits, we're excited to deploy the TVM update to TON Mainnet. The validators voted to activate the TVM update and updated their software on November 30. The new TVM functionality is enabled immediately.

This update is poised to make TVM one of the most flexible and capable virtual machines for creating smart contracts, services, and products.

TVM update in simple terms

Simply put, we add to TON all cryptographic and hash primitives, which is required to support interactions with other blockchains: SHA256, SHA512, BLAKE2B, secp256k1 and more.

Besides, TVM now also support modern and fast cryptography BLS12-381 and Ristretto which are used for cutting edge ZKP protocols.

Please note that this update doesn't directly affect you as a user in any way. It improves TON's functionality, versatility, and security but doesn't impact the user experience.

List of updates

To take it a step further, we have added to TVM the widest possible range of cryptography methods:

• Hash functions over an unlimited number of bytes:
• SHA256 - OpenSSL implementation
• SHA512 - OpenSSL implementation
• BLAKE2B - OpenSSL implementation
• KECCAK256 - Ethereum-compatible implementation
• KECCAK512 - Ethereum-compatible implementation

Cryptographic primitives on the following curves:

• secp256k1 - Bitcoin/Ethereum signatures
• secp256r1 - useful for hardware wallets
• Ristretto - fast and safe operations on elliptic curves
• BLS12-381 - curve operations with pairing support

Other updates

• New instructions to simplify writing smart contracts and security enhancements
• Ability to securely run TVM from inside TVM via RUNVM
• Opcodes to work with the new c7 values
• Support for arbitrary-precision arithmetics
• Stack operations
• New hash family of operations
• Updated functionality for sending messages

You can find the complete list of improvements here.

We wanto to highlight the amazing work of several TON community teams who already started building with the TVM, including
Tonnel Network, Redstone, Evaa, TON Teleport , and Clean.ton.

There were a lot of great ideas at the TVM hackathon.