The TON blockchain did not work for six hours. What caused the problems in the network?
The Telegram Open Network (TON) blockchain halted for about six hours tonight, with the pause preventing the network from producing new blocks for that period of time. TON was eventually restored, but the technical problems caused serious concern in the community amid recent events. At the weekend, Pavel Durov, the creator of the Telegram messenger, into which TON is integrated, was arrested in France.
Recall, the reason for the detention of Durov in France was his unwillingness to cooperate with local authorities. It is assumed that the latter are not satisfied with the use of Telegram messenger for terrorist communication, distribution of banned content and other illegal activities.
And since the Telegram team does not always want to make contact with regulators and other government representatives, Durov, who also holds French citizenship, was the last one in the situation.
Pavel Durov of the Telegram team
Pavel is expected to receive charges related to supporting terrorism, drug trafficking, fraud and money laundering, and the punishment for such a thing could be up to 20 years. Representatives of the Telegram project said that such an approach is absurd, as Durov is not responsible for the abuse of the platform's capabilities by others.
The situation has faced sharp criticism from representatives of various spheres – and the cryptocurrency industry in particular. For example, Vitalik Buterin, the creator of Etherium, said that what is happening makes one wonder about the prospects of freedom of speech in France, and not from the best side.
French President Emmanuel Macron also reacted to the detention. He noted that this case is not political, while the government allegedly acts within the law and complies with all norms.
French President Emmanuel Macron
Due to Durov’s arrest, the exchange rate of the cryptocurrency Toncoin TON has collapsed. Over the past week, its value has fallen by 17 per cent.
Change in the value of the cryptocurrency Toncoin TON over the past week
And now to the list of problems with the project was joined by the network going offline.
What happened to TON?
Blockchain observer Tonscan noted that the blockchain stopped creating new blocks at around 1:11 a.m. Moscow time on Tuesday. As a result, exchanges Binance and Bybit temporarily suspended the deposit and withdrawal of the native token of the Toncoin project (TON).
TON’s official Twitter account also commented on the incident. The relevant rejoinder is cited by The Block.
The TON blockchain is currently experiencing disruptions in block creation. The problem has arisen due to abnormal load on TON. Several validators are unable to clear the database of old transactions, which has led to a loss of consensus.
As the project representatives noted, there were more than 20 million transactions in two days. And this created a load on validators, which faced problems.
Telegram co-founder Pavel Durov
Telegram’s TON Status group said that validators should have restarted their nodes at around 7am with certain flags to get the network back to normal. Here’s the quote.
At this point, not enough validators have restarted their nodes with the correct flags. If you haven’t already restarted your nodes with the new flags, please do so as soon as possible.
That is, it was not possible to restart the network at the right time immediately. However, after some time, the number of validators was sufficient to keep the blockchain active.
TON blockchain restores its operation
A flag in the TON blockchain is a special bit token used in a data structure or transaction to indicate certain states or actions. Flags allow information to be encoded efficiently, improving the processing and transmission of data within the blockchain.
The use of flags also helps reduce the amount of data that needs to be transmitted, and with it, improves network performance.
Transaction growth on the TON network
According to CoinDesk’s sources, after a pause of several hours, the TON blockchain has been restored.
Most likely, the culprit behind the surge in the number of transactions in TON was the recent airdrop of the DOGS meme token. DOGS attracted considerable attention from the crypto community, as its developers revealed plans to expand the token’s usefulness in the Telegram ecosystem.
It should be noted that the Solana network has previously experienced congestion problems, precisely because of the popularisation of meme tokens and the associated huge influx of users. Because of this, for several weeks in the spring it was problematic to conduct a transaction in this blockchain from the first time.
As a result, on Monday the team announced the start of the token giveaway: 81.5 percent of the fixed supply of 550 billion tokens will go to community members.
DOGS meme token rate changes
This isn’t the first problem with TON the day before. On Saturday 24 August, users reported a hack of the native wallet for TON on Telegram. Specifically, they received an offer to send coins to a specified address to supposedly be doubled.
As a result, the wallet’s pages in Telegram and the project’s support pages were labelled as a scam. Since then, the situation has returned to normal.
TON wallet in the messenger Telegram
The TON network went offline, after which it needed to be restarted to get back up and running. The Solana network had faced similar problems from time to time before, because of which it was undeservedly accused of being too centralised.
In reality, the joining of independent blockchain validators in such situations is a manifestation of decentralisation, as they keep a large organism running by communicating with each other. And the faster the process, the more efficient their activity. And TON has successfully managed to overcome this problem.
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