The TON (The Open Network) has recently experienced a considerable deceleration. This slowdown is believed to be a result of the introduction of Bitcoin Ordinals ‘inscriptions’ on TON, which has led to a significant increase in activity. In an attempt to explain the situation, the TON Foundation issued a ‘Technical Incident Report.’
The abnormal transaction surge created a poor user experience due to some TON network validators not providing the necessary hardware. We regret to announce the temporary halt of the inscription service for the benefit of the Tonano community and the entire TON ecosystem.
— Tonano (@Ton_scription) December 7, 2023
According to the report, the network’s slowdown was due to the processing of “over 3 million new transactions.” TonStat, a platform that offers data related to TON, currently displays around 2 million transactions for December 5, with an additional 800,000 transactions on December 6. This marks a substantial rise from the roughly 266,000 transactions recorded on December 4.
TON experienced a significant drop in its transaction per second (TPS) speed due to an increase in usage, primarily driven by a surge in TON20 transactions beginning on December 5. TON20, an inscription standard inspired by the Bitcoin Ordinals protocols, was introduced by the Tonano team.
The Rise of TON20 and Its Effect on TON
However, the TON blockchain struggled to manage the increased load, which developers attribute to the subpar hardware used by some of the main network validators. As a result, the TPS on TON plummeted from 100,000 to less than one, according to data from dTON.io.
Developers of TON have announced the implementation of a decentralized penalty system to deter network participants from conducting substandard operations. They are also considering enhancing the system with stricter penalties. However, they have requested patience from community members to prevent impacting innocent validators.
In the interim, a patch has been released to increase transaction speed, and all validators have been advised to upgrade their hardware to meet the blockchain’s requirements.
TON’s native token experienced a 5% drop during the initial updates on the outage. However, the token, TON, managed to recover some of its losses and traded 0.6% up, according to Coingecko. CertiK has declared TON as the world’s fastest blockchain, surpassing competitors like Solana, after achieving a record TPS speed of 104,715.
