No, Free TON Hasn’t Just Forked Telegram’s TON Blockchain
Free TON Community, an independent group of developers and users, have just launched a free version of the Telegram Open Network, or TON. During the launch event on May 7, community members answered major questions about the Free TON Blockchain launch.
At the launch Zoom call, a number of users were wondering whether the Free TON Blockchain represents a fork of Telegram’s original TON. According to a key community member, the Free TON Blockchain should not be referred to as a fork.
“There is no network to fork”
Mitja Goroshevsky, CTO at TON Labs — a third-party group of TON infrastructure developers — says that the Free TON Blockchain is not a fork of the TON because no preexisting chain exists.
The executive said:
“We didn’t really fork anything. We’ve built from the available repositories. I think people are using two different meanings of the “fork” — the fork of the repository and the fork of the network. The fork of the repository is a basic thing how GitHub works. [...] If the question is about the fork of the network, then there is no network to fork.”
The definition of a fork in blockchain is not particularly easy to understand. One well-known example is Bitcoin Cash (BCH), which is a hard fork of major cryptocurrency, Bitcoin (BTC). A fork is a radical change or split in the original blockchain which creates two blockchains that run on different parameters. In most cases, a hard fork results in the older version of the chain dying off. Sometimes however, both forks remain operational, with each forming a separate community of network users and contributors.
TON Crystal listing is a direct question to crypto exchanges
As Cointelegraph reported earlier in the day, the Free TON Community has distributed Free TON tokens as part of the launch. According to Ron Millow, chief business development officer at TON Labs, the official name of Free TON’s cryptocurrency is TON Crystal. “The official technical name is the TON Crystal. However, in short, we’re just calling them TONs, as simple as that,” Millow explained.
Similar to TON’s original cryptocurrency, GRAM (GRM), the Free TON Community has issued around five billion TON Crystal tokens. According to the Free TON blockchain browser, there are 5,000,002,836 TON Crystal tokens, with 85% of them distributed to Free TON partners and users, 10% going to developers. The remaining 5% will go to the community’s validators.
During the call, the community also noted that the question of listing the TON Crystal token on cryptocurrency exchanges is a “direct question to exchanges.”
Free TON signs over 1,000 new members in a few hours after launch
As initially announced, anyone can become part of the Free TON network by simply signing the community’s Declaration of Decentralization (DOD). In a couple of hours since the launch, more than 1,000 people have signed the DOD to join the Free TON community as of press time.
Among the purported new members, the Free TON network has immediately had at least one crypto exchange. As said in the call, an exec at Ukraine’s major crypto exchange, Kuna exchange, has immediately signed the DOD to join the network.
In conjunction with the unexpected Free TON blockchain launch by the Free TON Community, TON Labs has also open sourced major components of TON blockchain’s operating system, TON OS, on their GitHub.