Original | Odaily Planet Daily (@OdailyChina)
Author | Fu He How (@vincent 31515173)
Recently, the TON Foundation announced plans to launch the ecological infrastructure project TON Teleport BTC, which allows users to transfer BTC between the Bitcoin blockchain and TON without relying on intermediaries. At the same time, in the future, more EVM ecosystems will be connected to create a multi-chain interconnected ecological landscape. However, it is currently only a one-way cross-chain bridge, and there is still a long way to go before true multi-chain interoperability.
Although there is no major innovation in technology, the profound meaning behind the TON blockchain is self-evident. Odaily Planet Daily will analyze the real purpose behind TON's move by disassembling the technology of TON Teleport BTC itself.
TON Teleport cross-chain technology is innovative, but it may be slow
The TON official article briefly explains the relevant technologies of TON Teleport BTC:
“TON Teleport is a new infrastructure project in the ecosystem that will allow users to transfer (“peg” and “unpeg”) BTC between the Bitcoin blockchain and TON without relying on a central intermediary. It will use a trustless system to increase security and autonomy, ensuring that transactions are transparent and free from external control.”
“The process will involve users sending their BTC to a specific Bitcoin address that is unique to each user. Once the Bitcoin transaction is confirmed, an equal amount of BTC will be issued to the user’s address on the TON blockchain. Users can then use these BTC tokens in various DApps on TON or redeem them for BTC on the Bitcoin network. For the reverse process, users will destroy their BTC tokens on TON, which triggers the release and return of their BTC.”
“The TON Teleport BTC process is trustless and transparent, operating without a centralized issuer. Every BTC on TON will be 100% backed by actual BTC, pegged through the teleport process, ensuring transactions are secure and reliable. The system automates everything from verification to confirmation through network validators and smart contracts, eliminating the possibility of human error, censorship, or fraud. This automation and lack of intermediaries not only enhances security, but also maintains transparency and freedom for users to manage their cryptocurrency without interference.”
According to its description, TON Teleport uses network validators and smart contracts to automatically perform all operations from verification to confirmation, where users on the Bitcoin mainnet will transfer an equal amount of BTC minted on the TON blockchain to each user's specific Bitcoin address.
It is not difficult to find from here that the technical principle of TON Teleport is to create a new Bitcoin address with a locking function for the user on the Bitcoin main network. After the user transfers BTC to this address, TON Teleport will run the Bitcoin client (that is, the network validator in the article) to detect whether the transaction is completed; once the monitoring transaction is completed, the smart contract of the TON blockchain will create a corresponding mapping BTC and transfer it to the user's TON address, thereby forming a trustless mapping BTC minting function.
But how does the TON blockchain ensure that newly created Bitcoin addresses for users are managed and monitored, and prevent people from doing evil? This is actually not disclosed in the official article, which is also the most confusing part of the TON Teleport project. The author speculates that the technical principle may be that the TON Teleport project and the user jointly manage the key of the Bitcoin address, which may be able to prevent evil behavior from both parties.
We look forward to the TON Foundation disclosing more details in the future to dispel the doubts from a technical perspective. At the same time, considering the operating speed of the Bitcoin mainnet and the message transmission speed with other blockchains, the cross-chain speed is slow, but the security can be guaranteed. (Odaily Note: TON official articles have little technical interpretation of TON Teleport BTC. They only describe the operation process of BTC to TON blockchain, and do not disclose the detailed technology. Therefore, the technical disassembly in this article relies on analogies with similar cross-chains before. If TON blockchain releases more detailed documents in the future, it will be corrected again.)
Long before TON blockchain launched Teleport, other public chain ecosystem projects had already tried to introduce mapping BTC one after another to enrich the diversity of their own ecosystems. The following is an introduction to the Ethereum ecosystem project that introduced BTC. Odaily Planet Daily hopes to help readers better understand the technical principles of TON Teleport and its subsequent development space through the following content.
WBTC is the earliest and most widely used tokenized form of Bitcoin on Ethereum. Each WBTC token is pegged 1:1 to Bitcoin on the chain. Through custodians (such as BitGo) holding actual Bitcoin, merchants (such as Kyber, Ren) handle users' WBTC minting and redemption requests. WBTC is managed through smart contracts, and all minting and destruction operations are recorded on the chain. Its advantages are high transparency and strong liquidity, but it relies on centralized custodians and merchants.
renBTC is a decentralized tokenized Bitcoin provided by the Ren protocol. It realizes the exchange of BTC and ETH through the RenVM (Ren Virtual Machine) cross-chain bridge. RenVM uses decentralized multi-party computing technology to manage the cross-chain operation of Bitcoin. Users deposit Bitcoin into RenVM, and RenVM mints an equal amount of renBTC on Ethereum. Its advantages are decentralization and high privacy, but the technical implementation is relatively complex.
tBTC is a decentralized Bitcoin tokenization protocol developed by Keep Network and Summa. tBTC manages Bitcoin custody through a distributed network of "signers" who use cryptography to manage BTC deposits. Signers must provide ETH as collateral to ensure security and stability. tBTC is fully decentralized, reducing reliance on a single entity and has high security, but the user experience is more complicated.
sBTC is a synthetic asset provided by the Synthetix platform. It is not directly anchored to actual Bitcoin, but rather achieves Bitcoin price exposure on Ethereum through synthetic assets. sBTC relies on the underlying mechanism of the Synthetix platform, using the Synthetix collateral pool and smart contract over-collateralization to achieve price anchoring with BTC. Users can trustlessly trade sBTC and other synthetic assets on the Synthetix platform. Its advantages are trustless trading and high liquidity, but there is a risk of indirect anchoring to Bitcoin.
Comparing the above four BTC issuance schemes on Ethereum, WBTC currently has the highest popularity and user base, mainly due to its first-mover advantage: as one of the earliest asset mapping projects, WBTC was the first to receive support from DeFi protocol leaders Aave and Compound protocol, which is also the core reason why it can defeat many competitors with its centralized architecture.
Now that TON Teleport has been launched, it may also be able to gain first-mover advantage: (1) The BTC cross-chain bridge project launched by the TON Foundation has a high status in the TON ecosystem; (2) The TON blockchain is the first BTC cross-chain bridge project and is unique; (3) The TON blockchain operates in a trustless manner, which dispels user concerns and is more in line with Telegram's privacy features.
The above points are sufficient to prove the future development prospects of TON Teleport and the future improvement of TON blockchain.
TON already has Telegram’s traffic pool, so why does it need to rely on cross-chain to find new traffic?
Previously, when the crypto world talked about cross-chain, people basically thought of multi-chain interconnection, unified liquidity, and asset transfer. However, the core purpose of most cross-chain is to attract users and funds from other chains to their own ecosystems, thereby achieving their own leapfrog development.
The TON blockchain is very different from previous projects with cross-chain requirements. Relying on Telegram's 900 million monthly active users, TON already has a huge traffic delivery channel. All it needs is for its own ecosystem to better handle this traffic. The emergence of TON Teleport will bring together high-quality assets from other chains to the TON blockchain through a single cross-chain approach, and use the influence of these high-quality assets to enable the TON blockchain to better digest the traffic brought by Telegram.
In addition, the running speed and network cost of TON blockchain itself have certain advantages compared with other chains. The only thing lacking is that there are no high-quality assets in the ecosystem. When BTC is mapped to the TON blockchain and assets from the future EVM ecosystem flow in, the prosperity of TON ecosystem DeFi will be greatly improved.
Finally, BTC taking root in the TON blockchain can better form a closed-loop ecosystem with encrypted transactions on Telegram, making the linkage between the two closer.
To sum up, the launch of TON Teleport by TON blockchain may create a new type of multi-asset complex with Telegram as the traffic delivery center.
