Memories: 10 Key Contributions of the TON Core Team That Few People Knew in the Early Days

Author: Dr. Awesome Doge

Compiled by: Wu Says Blockchain

Although the TON Foundation is a more widely known name, few people know the story of its early contributors—the NEWTON team (the core team of TON).

Through voluntary technical contributions, the NEWTON team gained recognition from the official @Telegram team in 2021, ultimately achieving a technical handover, marking the most significant "community takeover" in blockchain history.

As one of the early members of NEWTON, let me share this story. --- @drawesomedoge

Introduction: Joining the NEWTON Team and Its Mission

When I joined the NEWTON team, our main mission was very clear: to enhance developer tools while maintaining the stability of the TON testnet2 code.

Since we could not directly control the ton-blockchain GitHub repository but needed to continuously optimize the code, we established a new organization called NEWTON. To ensure smooth network updates, we encouraged the community to use the validators developed by NEWTON as the standard version.

From our establishment until June 2021, the NEWTON team completed several groundbreaking development and infrastructure projects. Let’s take a closer look at the 10 key contributions that shaped the early days of TON.

1. mytonctrl: Automated Node Management Tool

Our first significant contribution was mytonctrl, a powerful automation tool for node installation and validator setup.

It provides essential features including wallet creation, contract deployment, transaction history retrieval, and even a DNS registration system—interestingly, the DNS at that time was not the same as the modern NFT-packaged DNS we see today.

mytonctrl can also configure validators, light node servers (liteservers), and light clients (liteclients), making access to and parsing of node data straightforward. In 2021, we added CPU-based mining scripts and automated performance testing to streamline the $TON mining process.

2. tonmon: Blockchain Health Status Visualization Tool

Having nodes and accessing data is not enough; we needed more visualization tools to monitor the health of the blockchain.

To better monitor blockchain health, we developed tonmon. This tool can track key metrics: block generation time, shard status, dPoS election schedule, number and weight of validators, and the status of mining contracts. Through it, we could quickly respond to any network anomalies.

In those early days, the network was relatively small, with only about 80 validators worldwide.

3. tonmine: Monitoring Giver Contracts

We developed tonmine to track TON's mining activities. Although there were many large and small Givers on the TON blockchain initially, by 2021 only ten small Givers remained.

tonmine displayed daily mining statistics for each contract, with a single contract averaging 20,000 $TON per day, totaling about 200,000 $TON across all contracts daily.

The differences in mining difficulty between different Givers were significant, depending on the number of miners—some Givers had lower difficulty due to fewer miners, while others had extremely high difficulty due to many miners.

4. Cross-Chain Bridge

Before TON had the jetton or NFT standards, we recognized the importance of cross-chain compatibility. The NEWTON team developed a native $TON cross-chain bridge for ERC-20 tokens on EVM-compatible chains and successfully tested it on bridge.ton.org. This made seamless transfers between TON, Ethereum, and BSC possible.

5. cryptobot: Telegram Bot Wallet

Before Telegram mini apps emerged in 2021, team members developed cryptobot, a Telegram wallet. It initially supported $BTC, $TON, $BNB, and $USDT. Later, with the launch of Telegram mini apps, the wallet underwent a complete overhaul.

6. toncenter: Simplifying Blockchain Data Access

With toncenter, developers do not need to set up full nodes, study liteclients or liteservers, or worry about serialization data format issues.

toncenter provides a public API that greatly simplifies the process for various wallets and blockchain explorers to access on-chain data.

Although TON's infrastructure has continued to evolve with the emergence of more API providers like tonxapi.com, toncenter still serves developers, and its powerful design has become a classic.

7. explorer.toncoin.org: The First Blockchain Explorer for TON

The first TON blockchain explorer was built into the core codebase and is located at explorer.toncoin.org. Although it runs extremely fast, the data presentation was too technical for most users.

8. ton.sh: Next-Generation Blockchain Explorer

To address the complexity issues of explorer.toncoin.org, we created ton.sh. After solving the challenges of blockchain data deserialization, we launched a public API for ton.sh.

ton.sh focuses on core functionalities: wallet balance, transaction history, especially memo. For early TON users, memo was crucial as it served as a command operation carrier before TON Connect or complex DeFi contracts emerged, playing an important role especially in deposit operations on exchanges.

Although there are now more advanced explorers like TONScan and TONViewer, ton.sh remains a historic milestone in TON development.

9. TonWeb: Important JavaScript SDK

Since TON smart contracts use the more complex languages Fift and Func, the NEWTON team developed TonWeb—a JavaScript SDK that simplifies wallet creation, deployment, and transaction operations.

10. ton wallet: My First TON Wallet

This TON wallet dates back to the Telegram era; it was my first wallet—surprisingly, it is still functioning well today.

Historic Recognition: An Open Letter from the NEWTON Team to the @Telegram Official Team

By June 2021, the NEWTON team had made significant contributions, including running public light node servers (liteservers), DHT servers, and archive nodes to maintain network stability. At this time, tolya-yanot wrote an open letter (link) documenting our year of work to the TON blockchain team and requested GitHub organization permissions.

The letter listed the two leaders of NEWTON and key team members.

That's right, I—Dr. Awesome Doge—was also on the list.

At that time, I thought it was just an open letter—a good attempt to showcase our contributions to the network, without expecting any response.

To our surprise, the @Telegram official team responded on June 30, 2021.

This marked the beginning of a new chapter in the history of the TON blockchain.

Reflection and Outlook: A Builder's Remarks

Looking back on this extraordinary journey, the early contributions of the NEWTON team go far beyond the code itself. Every line of code, every tool we built, every sleepless night spent maintaining the network—these efforts laid the foundation for TON's development today.

Seeing the explosive growth of TON in 2024, with thousands of developers joining the ecosystem, validates what we believed in those challenging early days—that the potential of TON is worth fighting for.