TON@DeFi.org, powered by the Orbs Network, is a DeFi.org initiative dedicated to the organization’s activities on the TON blockchain. Since the activities around TON are new, we wanted to explain to the community why this new direction has been taken.

DeFi.org is a community of DeFi thought leaders. Together we are building an ecosystem of fully decentralized financial applications on leading L1 blockchains like Ethereum and TON. We educate, invest, accelerate and build. Powered by the Orbs Network.

Our Mission

What is the innovation behind the TON blockchain? The ability to easily build decentralized apps for millions of users.

Decentralized apps can be trustless - meaning their users can deposit/invest money in them without fear that their creators could harm them through malicious behavior or negligence.

What is the difference?

Our mission is to educate developers and users about this difference. It is our responsibility as a community to hold each other accountable and build a trustless ecosystem to keep users safe.

Why TON?

There’s no doubt that blockchain is disrupting the world around us. But there’s so much noise out there. So many blockchains and cryptocurrencies - what makes TON special?

We recognize 3 fundamental infrastructure use cases for blockchain:

First movers are rarely replaced. We don’t believe Bitcoin or Ethereum will be dethroned by their direct competitors. TON’s unique value proposition comes from being the first to expand to a new uncaptured territory - blockchain for the masses.

Why Decentralized Apps?

This is the point of using blockchain!

The designers of TON went into great lengths to make sure that all core TON blockchain infrastructure services are fully decentralized:

• Anyone can run a validator and participate in PoS consensus without permission
• Anyone can acquire, transfer and stake TON coins without permission
• Anyone can access the chain directly without intermediaries without permission
• Anyone can write and deploy dapps as smart contracts without permission

Making your app centralized will defeat the point of using TON in the first place. There are far simpler infrastructure solutions that run centralized apps.

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Centralization puts users at risk

Decentralized apps are trustless, meaning users are not required to trust their developers. The developers are not able to harm the users in any way that isn’t included in the app’s code, even if they tried.

Users may get hurt even if you don’t intend to be malicious. If your credentials can cause damage, a hacker can compromise them and then users will get hurt. One of your employees can decide to steal and abuse their position. You don’t want to be responsible for these wrongdoings.

Decentralization creates transparency and allows users to make informed choices about what apps to use. This is the trustless model that blockchain is based on.

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Centralization reduces app value

Consider the most successful apps on blockchain: The Bored Apes NFT collection has had individual items sold for over a million dollars. The lending DeFi apps Compound and Aave have tens of billions of dollars deposited in their smart contracts.

How did these apps become so financially successful?

Users did not know the founders of Bored Apes, Compound or Aave. Even if they did know who they were, they certainly wouldn’t trust them with a million dollars. Especially when they provide no legal obligation and there isn’t any form of signed legal contract involved.

Decentralization is the answer.

Users are only able to deposit millions in DeFi apps because they are trustless and even their founders don’t have access to funds. Without being decentralized, these apps wouldn’t be able to grow in value.

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Decentralized apps are unstoppable

Nobody can stop Bitcoin because it’s decentralized. There’s no single entity that runs it.

The same is true with decentralized apps. Even if you, the developer, go out of business or all of your servers are down, the app will live on and never stop.

If users deposit funds in your app, they will always be safe and will never lose access to their funds because of your downtime.

A decentralized app is not dependent on you for its execution. It has no servers that can go offline, just smart contracts. Running it is the responsibility of the community, not yours.

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App Safety Guidelines

It’s quite easy to keep an app decentralized, you just need to follow a few simple rules:

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TON - Decentralized Apps for the Masses

While the advantages of decentralized apps are clear, so far the blockchain industry as a whole has not been able to create decentralized apps that have true mass appeal and usage. Part of this is the fact that existing infrastructures are better designed for what we call “super-users” - those who are dealing with a significant amount of funds, are very tech savvy, or both.

There has long been a need for an infrastructure layer that can reach billions of end users with blockchain technology. TON, designed from the beginning to be integrated with the Telegram messaging app and bring its hundreds of millions of users to blockchain, has the potential to be that infrastructure. It has unique and sophisticated approaches to a variety of issues such as sharding, fee structure and developer environment that set it apart from the crowd. If TON is successful, it can bring the benefits of decentralized applications described above to the world.

Defi.org is excited to contribute educational and development efforts to this initiative for the benefit of the entire community.

Project Spotlight

Here are a few examples of projects we are contributing to:

1. TonSwap - AMM

TonSwap is a fully decentralized on-chain AMM/DEX for TON. TonSwap implements the Uniswap algorithm in a set of FunC contracts designed from scratch for the TON distributed architecture. It allows traders to swap tokens and liquidity providers to support these trades and earn rewards. TonSwap is an excellent example of how to implement a complex app that follows the App Safety Guidelines from end to end.

GitHub: https://github.com/tonswap

2. Jetton Deployer

Jetton Deployer is an open source community tool that allows anyone to issue a new fungible token (Jetton) on the TON blockchain. The tool deploys the Jetton contract in one click directly from the browser and implements all recommended security best practices. The tool is completely decentralized and follows the App Safety Guidelines end to end. The tool also provides a quick security summary about existing Jettons.

Website: https://jetton.live

GitHub: https://github.com/tonswap

3. Ton App Starter Template

Starter templates for a new TON app project - FunC contracts, TypeScript tests, compilation and deployment scripts, as well as a web client in TypeScript and a Telegram bot example. The setup follows best practices on how to properly test a smart contract and what information should be published alongside to the community.

GitHub: https://github.com/ton-defi-org/tonstarter-contracts

4. Ton Offline Transaction

A step-by-step protocol for handling cold storage TON wallets. Cold storage requires that the wallet’s private key (derived from the secret 24 word mnemonic) is never placed on a device that is connected to the Internet in order to eliminate potential hacks. The protocol allows users to sign transactions offline and send them to mainnet from a different device.

GitHub; https://github.com/ton-defi-org/ton-offline-transaction

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