💵 Orbs has chosen TON as its base for blockchain development

The Orbs network announced a long-term strategic partnership with The Open Network (TON). This event is important for both blockchains, as it unites the efforts of their teams in deploying the decentralized infrastructure necessary for the operation of Web3.

Orbs was launched in 2017 and has since then helped developers create decentralized protocols and products. As an L3 network, it complements and builds services upon the L1/L2 networks base.

It has also partnered with Polygon, BSC, Avalanche, Fantom and others. Working on top of blockchains, Orbs enables service developers to expand their capabilities. Practically, it works as a separate add-on, like a bridge between L1/L2 and applications.

According to the Orbs team, TON is the L1 network that will arouse the interest of billions of users and be the first blockchain to be massively adopted.

Interestingly, at a recent AMA session, the CFO of Huobi Lily Zhang said the same thing: "Using user-friendly products for the mass market, TON can become one of the most promising first-level blockchains and attract hundreds of millions of Web 2.0 users to the world of cryptocurrencies."

The most interesting news @DeepTonEng🤔

👛 TON: The 5th generation blockchain

Recently, TON has increasingly been called the 3rd generation blockchain. This is, in fact, very wrong. The Open Network, created by the Durov brothers, is a powerful technology, and in terms of architecture, components, and capabilities, it belongs to the 5th generation.

Judging by the survey, we are pleased to see that most of you are aware of this. But let's examine this further. First, we will briefly discuss each generation of blockchains according to its features.

➡️The 1st generation is, of course, the Bitcoin network: the crypto pioneer with its "Proof-of-Work" consensus algorithm, or PoW for short. This network is dependent on miners, is energy-consuming, and has tremendous difficulty scaling up.

➡️The 2nd generation started with Ethereum and the addition of smart contracts. By the way, this blockchain has recently changed the consensus of PoW to PoS – "Proof-of-Stake", which is actually an attribute of the 3rd generation. Ethereum is a vast ecosystem and a recognized leader in launching DeFi, game development, and DApps.

➡️The 3rd generation is the most common. It works on the PoS consensus. Its blockchains include NANO, Banano, Cardano, Solana, and others. And here, this technology is already quite successfully tackling the issue of scalability, has an attack resistance of 51%, etc.

➡️The 4th generation consists of decentralized networks such as Polkadot and EOS. Their advantages are high scalability, low costs, high protection against SYBIL and DDoS attacks, 51% resistance, and ease of use for business applications. Moreover, these blockchains use Hashgraph for clearer consensus. However, they still have problems processing and transmitting complex data over the network. There is also no complete backend control over the integrity and security of the system, and no high scalability from sharding and close interaction among blockchains.

➡️ Finally, the 5th generation is TON, and so is Free TON (now Everscale), according to their statement. This is not surprising, since Free TON relied on the Open Source repository of the closed Durov project from its very beginning.

But before we continue, let's take the time for any comments or questions that you may have.

Stay curious @DeepTonEng

Introducing new key components of TON: TON Sites and TON Proxy

Quite a few blockchains have announced their commitment to constructing the new Web3 Internet. However, when it comes to practical implementation, those projects mainly focus on developing financial instruments for the new economy based on tokens and decentralization.

But Web3 is much more than a way to improve money exchange using cryptocurrency. It is a digital multiverse where new rules, relationships, and even worlds are emerging. Web3 has a huge potential for creating new value.

That's why the launch of crucial ecosystem components by TON Foundation developers, TON Sites and TON Proxy, is such a landmark event. These tools and the previously launched DNS are essential to creating the next generation of the Internet.

And despite being far from completion, we can say that the TON network is already decentralized, anonymous, secure and stable. In fact, the developers have proposed a universal network technology like I2P or TOR, which allows for the creation of Web3.

Now, any user can start up their own website, purchase a domain name, and even auction off its subdomains. It is also easy to link a wallet to the domain. The network is accessed through special entry points called "entry-proxy".

The intercompatibility between TON Proxy and HTTP Proxy makes it possible to open .ton sites straight from the browser, just like regular websites.

We thank the blockchain developers for this incredible advancement.❤️

Gratefully yours, @DeepTonEng

TON's consensus algorithm

Nikolai Durov has once described what should be the consensus in a blockchain in his article Catchain Consensus: An Outline. But let's start with the basics.

Consensus and its types

To put it simply, a consensus is an algorithm for generating and verifying blocks in a blockchain. The most common consensuses are PoW and PoS.

➕ PoW (Proof-of-Work), also known as the bitcoin algorithm, is based on the work of miners. It has significant disadvantages, such as low transaction processing speed and excessive power consumption.

➕ PoS (Proof-of-Stake) eliminates the shortcomings of its predecessor and assigns a validator to check the correctness of transactions through a staking process.

➕dPoS (Delegated-proof-of-stake) is similar to PoS, but includes a voting and delegation mechanism. The goal is clear: to entice users to protect their network and check blocks using leftover coins as collateral.

TON, however, uses the PoS consensus along with BFT. This detail is worth mentioning because TON does not simply use the PoS blockchain consensus. And here's why this is important.

Below is a classification of blockchains by generation, taking into account their respective type of consensus:

➡️1st and 2nd generation: PoW
➡️3rd and 4th generation: PoS and dPoS
➡️5th generation - PoS with BFT

Thus, TON uses the Catchain consensus algorithm, which consists of several upper and lower-level protocols. Reconciliation occurs before creating a new block, which mitigates the occurrence of intermediate forks.

Catchain is based on the well-known Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance algorithm (PBFT), which boasts increased resistance against Sybil attacks. It is also similar to the Tendermint and dBFT algorithms. However, due to some significant differences, it should be attributed to a separate class of algorithms.

Yours truly, @DeepTonEng