TON (The Open Network) inherits the legacy of Telegram’s early fundraising project (which was refunded due to US regulatory enforcement), and issues TON tokens in the form of “mining” under the slogan of “community initiative, adopted by Telegram”, and In 2024, TON will be raised from 2 US dollars to 8 US dollars. At the same time, TON is highly integrated with Telegram’s in-program applications: games, wallets, address domains, anonymous phone numbers, paid advertising, etc. The founder has also gone from operating Telegram independently to admitting his ownership and participation in TON, and revealing that it includes China and Russia. , South Korea and Taiwan and other capital components Ton Foundation (Ton Foundation).
TON has not only become one of the top ten cryptocurrencies by market capitalization, but is also the darling of the new generation of currency speculators. In 2024, it also received strategic investment from American venture capital Pantera (the amount of investment was not disclosed). With extremely strong currency price support, why is this?
As of writing, the circulating supply of TON is 2,458,282,985, the total supply is 5,108,034,406 (no upper limit), and the circulating supply accounts for 48.13% of the supply. Is TON also considered a VC coin?
To answer this question, you can read the report investigated by a mysterious company Whiterabbit in 2023 (this company has only written two reports in three years). The content is extremely detailed and reveals the fact that the TON token is highly controlled. The report points out that the majority of TON tokens are miners associated with the TON Foundation.
The following are the details of this report, and brave people are welcome to verify the relevant data. (The inferences in this report are for reference only)
"TON Blockchain: A Group of Concerned Whales Mine 85% of TON Supply"
TLS：
During July and August 2020, 96% of TON supply was allocated to miners
At least 85.8% of the supply is mined by several groups of miners who are interconnected and affiliated with the TON Foundation
Funds from these groups of miners are used by network validators who control 2/3 of the TON blockchain’s PoS consensus
The current vote to freeze inactive addresses for 4 years has resulted in TON whales freezing some of their funds to address issues with blockchain adoption, but additional steps need to be taken in this direction
We share data collected from the TON blockchain to ensure the reproducibility of our research
About TON
The Open Network is a proof-of-stake blockchain originally built by the Telegram team but now supported by third-party developers.
A quick look at the history of The Open Network
testnet2 (currently mainnet) was launched by the Telegram team on November 15, 2019 (link).
In May 2020, Telegram suspended active participation in web development (link) due to disagreements with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
Subsequently, the Telegram team decided to distribute GRAM test tokens (link) through a token mining process that began on July 6, 2020.
In May 2021, testnet2 was renamed to the mainnet (link), and Telegram later transferred the rights to ton.org and the associated GitHub account to the development team, which continued to work on the project (link).
In February 2023, TON validators voted to freeze inactive accounts, representing approximately 20% of the total supply, for 4 years (link).
TON mining history
Telegram launched token mining on July 6, 2020, transferring tokens from system addresses to 20 contracts that distribute tokens.
There are two types of contract addresses: Small Givers and Large Givers. The second distributes more tokens (100,000 instead of 100 each time), but requires more computing power.
Mining lasted from July 6, 2020 to June 28, 2022, but almost all token issuance was distributed within the first 51 days:
From July 6 to August 26, 2020, large donor contracts distributed 4.8 billion tokens (96%) and small donor contracts distributed 9.9 million tokens (0.2%)
From August 27, 2020, to June 28, 2022, the Small Donor Contract distributed 117.3 million tokens (2.35%).
Token distribution by giver contract type
It is worth mentioning that the actual large-giver mining ended on August 24, but two addresses received the last 100,000 tokens from each large-giver contract on August 26. currency.
The remaining 1.45% was distributed from system addresses in 2019 – 2020 for testing purposes. The majority of these funds were subsequently transferred to a TON Foundation address.
Token distribution among donor contracts (link, table "Donors")
Since mining ended, the test GRAM token was renamed the mainnet TON token and its fully diluted market cap has grown from 0 to $11 billion in three years. (Another note from Chain News: FDV has grown to US$37.5 billion before the deadline)
Most major token holders (the big giver miners in 2020) still hold their tokens. A large portion of them may have long-term plans for the TON ecosystem, but regardless, at the time of writing, there is no exit liquidity in the market to sell the tokens. According to CoinMarketCap, TON token depth -2% and +2% is close to $200-400K on centralized exchanges (link). It is almost impossible to sell TON tokens on the open market without a significant change in market price. (Another note from Chain News: TON’s trading depth has been significantly increased in 2024.)
Token distribution analysis
There are 3278 unique addresses participating in mining, but only 248 addresses participating in the large giver contract distribution. We will focus on these 248 addresses since large donors account for 96% of the TON allocation.
Therefore, we know that 96% of the TON allocation is distributed between 248 addresses. Furthermore, these 248 addresses are closely connected: we found many groups of miner addresses that are related to each other and share the same patterns, such as mining start and end times or operations using mined coins. We also see some retail activity, but the majority of the token supply is mined by a group of whales that interact with each other.
Based on on-chain analysis, we distinguished several groups involved in large giver contract distribution and linked them to the TON Foundation and affiliated members:
The first group, "July 6 to July 30", accounts for 22% of the supply;
The second group "July 30-August 24" - 20% of the mining supply;
The third group "July 6-August 24" - 18.8% of mining supply;
The fourth group "July 19-August 24" - 17.2% of mining supply;
Other smaller groups began mining on August 1 and account for 7.8% of supply.
According to our calculations, addresses linked to the TON Foundation control at least 85.8% of the supply:
Let’s take a closer look at each group!
Group 1: July 6 to July 30
We discovered a group of 36 addresses that started mining on the first day (each address received its first reward between 18:55 on July 6 and 01:04 on July 7), and Mining ends on July 30:
On the evening of July 30, all 36 addresses stopped mining (link, table "July 6-July 30")
The group has 20 active addresses and 16 inactive addresses, which are frozen for 4 years after validators vote. Active addresses hold 650 million TON.
Some additional statistics about these addresses:
1) 17 of the 20 active addresses have the same pattern: between October 10 and December 18, 2021, only 1 withdrawal transaction of all funds was made to a third-party address per address Withdrawal transactions. Some withdrawals were made on the same day:
December 10, 2021: z6oH, KKeo, X0zB withdrawal intervals in the 3-minute range
December 17, 2021: X2i3, _QHG withdrawal interval in 10-minute range
October 26, 2021: 5Dk8, A1DI withdrawal interval within 6 hours
2) The other 3 active addresses made more transfers, and 1 of them (Pvgy) was donated to the TON Foundation and used for staking;
3) All these addresses mine tokens from all 20 large and small donor contracts.
These factors indicate that this group of addresses is managed by a giant whale. We are not suggesting that there is only one beneficiary of whale control. It can also be a group of people, but this group of people is closely connected to each other:
These nodes start mining from the beginning. Within hours of announcement, it was difficult to create and launch a mining pool with people unfamiliar with it
No funds were transferred to the 16 mining addresses (the miner has the private key = the miner still manages the 16 addresses)
The majority of active addresses (15 out of 19 addresses) hold tokens without any activity: tokens only moved once from 15 addresses to 15 other addresses.
The identity of the whales is unclear, but below we show that this group is related to other groups that interact directly with the TON Foundation.
The group mined 1.1 billion TON (22% of supply).
Group 2: July 30 to August 24
The previous group of 36 nodes ended mining on July 30. After shutting down all 36 nodes on the evening of July 30, a new set of 26 nodes was started on the same day:
All addresses in this group ended mining on August 24, 2020 (link, table "July 30-August 24")
The last reward date received by the first group (July 6 to July 30) is July 30 at 08:24:59 PM. The second group (July 30 to August 24) received the first reward date on July 30 at 08:25:47 PM. Therefore, there is only a 48 second gap between the two groups with no mining rewards.
More statistics about this group:
22 of these addresses are active and 4 addresses were frozen after the validator vote
This group of addresses is actively donating to the TON Foundation: 6 of them donated all their tokens, and 12 of them donated between 10% and 40% of the balance. The fact that 6 addresses donated 100% of the funds may indicate that the owners of these addresses have other addresses holding coins.
Three of the addresses participated in staking (wFRl, 1bqw, Owud): they sent money to addresses that interacted with the Elector contract. It is worth mentioning that Owud created multiple staking accounts by sending tokens to 13 unique addresses (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13) . Each address is a unique validator.
As we said above, the de facto big giver mining ended on August 24th, but the last tokens were distributed between two addresses on August 26th:
Large givers distributed 100k tokens each time, but for the last transaction they had nearly 99,560 tokens left on each address (100k minus gas fees from previous transactions).
F81K sends 430–450 tokens to each address, allowing large giver balances to reach 100k again.
It seems these transfers were made to allow mining to complete, with F81K mining 8 of the last 100k on 10 large giver addresses. 2 are mined by DjPI.
Large giver tokens are distributed on a daily basis
Launching 26 nodes in one night was the largest node launch in a single day since July 6th, and these nodes also mined from all 20 giver contracts (as the first group). Given that there was a 48-second gap between the two groups without mining rewards, it appears that the two sets of addresses were coordinated by a single operator.
What could be the reason for closing nodes and opening them again from a different address? We didn't find any technical reasons, but one theory is to make it feel decentralized.
The group mined another 1 billion TON (20% of supply).
Group 3: July 6 to August 24
As we wrote above, a group of 36 nodes started on July 6th and ended on July 30th, but may continue to exist under other addresses.
At the same time as the first group (from the beginning), another group of 14 nodes was launched on July 6th, but this group did not start mining coins until August 24th:
Link, form "July 6 to August 24"
This group is linked to the first group that operated from July 6 to July 30:
The Vqwi address of this group and the X0zB and KKeo of the first group are likely to have a common beneficiary. Funds from these three addresses (40 million tokens each) are aggregated in the wqrH address.
13 of the 15 addresses are active. 11 of them had the same pattern as the first group: between November 2, 2021, and January 14, 2020, they each made only 1 withdrawal transaction to a third-party address.
This group includes a putF, a key address for TON related operations that connects us to other groups of nodes. We'll come back to this address later.
This group mined an additional 940 million TON tokens (18.8% of supply).
Group 4: July 19 to August 24
There is another set of 17 miner addresses and we connect to the previous address. All addresses in this group received their first reward on July 19, and mining ended on August 24:
Link, form "July 19 to August 24"
This group includes n__T and oQMb addresses connected via BDa2 to putF (the key address of the third group):
oQMb uses two proxy addresses (gHKM, b_g5) to send 1 million TON to n__T (link) and 8WcG to send 1 million TON (link). 8WcG associates with BDa2 through reciprocal transfer;
BDa2 sends money to CcQ8, which receives funds from putF.
The fourth group<>The third group is related
Additionally, funds from w2Qp are used to provide liquidity for OKEX and FTX. This connects the w2Qp address to the TON Foundation team:
OKEX TONCOIN Listing Announcement November 12, 2021 (link) <> November 12, 2021 10 million TON transferred to OKEX (link);
FTX Listing Announcement November 11, 2021 (link) <> November 12, 2021 FTX’s 10 million TON transfer (link).
This group mined 859 million TON (17.2% of supply).
Therefore, the fourth group of miner addresses may be related to TON Foundation contributors and the former third group (July 6 to August 24). Therefore, all 4 groups in the study are correlated:
Associations between the first four groups
These 4 groups mined 3.9 billion TON tokens (78% of the supply).
Other smaller groups are also related to the group that preceded them
There are several smaller groups that started mining in August and are linked to the four groups mentioned above.
Group 5: August 1
The group consists of 13 addresses, centered around two large miners: w_VD and NL1O. They both received their first reward on August 1st and stopped mining on August 24th:
Link, table "August 1st"
The addresses in this group are closely connected through mutual transactions or intermediate addresses:
NL1O aggregates funds from fq1d, cnw0, wQ66, CmsJ and sends some tokens to w_WD through the dVZ_ address;
NL1O works with a1Tl, _5as, and Qnur to send tokens to multiple staking contracts for the same beneficiary.
The fifth set of correlations
This group is related to the first 4 groups: NL1O sent over 49 million TON to BDa2 (the intermediary address of the 4th group).
It also has direct connections with TON core community members through LJwP. We used the Tonscan address book to identify the wallets of several core community members.
LJwP sent 1000 TON several times to Oleg Illarionov (brainfucker.ton, co-founder of TON Keeper) (1, 2, 3)
LJwP sent 100 TON to an address belonging to Oleg Andreev (co-founder of TON Keeper). It also gained 0.1–0.9 TON several times (1, 2, 3, 4, etc.). In addition, LJwP also sent 600,000 TON to d8O2, which is related to the Tonkeeper team. The address then sent 506,803 TON to T3_d and 20,000 TON to PLZR. Both wallets are also related to Oleg Andreev.
LJwP sent 3300 TON and 100 TON to 968m, a wallet associated with Kirill Malev (First Stage Labs partner). This address has many mutual transactions with Kirill Malev's main address malev.ton (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, etc.) and has TON DOGS collections marked "malev" NFT.
Considering Kirill Malev's malev.ton primary address, he received 44O-i of TON funded by wFRI from the second group and 5_Dx from the fourth group:
Clusters 4 and 5 Relevance to Community Members Cluster 6: August 8-26
This group contains 68 addresses with similar behavior patterns. There are six key addresses in this group: Dwmn, Lwtm, F81K, M63-, tTFy, and tEVL. Between August 8 and August 26, the mining volume of these addresses ranged from 38 to 45 million TON. Other addresses mined no more than 900,000 TON and distributed all funds to a large miner (except tTFy) on August 7th.
This group has 2 subgroups:
The first one includes Dwmn, M63-, tTFy, and tEVL addresses connected through b4E9 and several other intermediary addresses;
The second subgroup includes Lwtm and F81K.
The sixth group related
All miners in the group received 0.01 TON as one of the first transactions of 2kJT – the address was launched on November 15, 2019, three hours after the launch of the mainnet (testnet2).
We also found that the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth groups are connected through the previously mentioned BDa2. In addition, the sixth and fifth are related through more addresses (e.g., AzQO and 91Gj).
Correlation between Groups 3, 4, 5 and 6 Group 7 August 18-24
This group consists of 4 addresses that started mining on August 18th or August 19th. Three of them received their final rewards on August 24:
Link, form "August 18-24"
This group has several obvious connections to other groups:
iE3g sent everything to LJwP in group 5
PQY_ is related to group 6 via dRZJ (see diagram above).
qzub connects to other groups via BDa2. Both of them sent TON to the address iPIP.
There is also an interesting question related to the wallet ceg_. It was the first wallet to send funds to the TON Foundation’s first address (25 TON test transaction). Furthermore, it is the only address that received TON from the TON Foundation’s first address: 12 TON sent after the first transaction and 7.5 TON a week later. This is a clear sign related to the TON Foundation.
All August groups mined 380 million TON (7.8% of supply).
validator
What about the current validators? We analyzed the incoming and outgoing transactions related to the current blockchain validators and mining groups.
The data was collected on February 25, and we analyzed a set of validators (TON does not unlock validator stakes immediately after epoch, so there are two sets of validator addresses that replace each other after each epoch).
Of the 272 active validators at the time, we found 170 validators related to the mining groups discussed above. In addition, 12 validators receive funds from the TON Foundation through direct transactions or proxy addresses.
Therefore, there are 182 (~66,9%) validators who receive funds from the above-defined mining group, and these validators are under the control of the above-mentioned early TON miner group.
The detailed results are as follows.
Basically, we group validators based on mining group. For example, Dwmn from the sixth group of miners sent 4.62 million TON to 5cNc, which distributed ~20 million TON among 20 validators (1.5 million TON each). Therefore, we associate all these validators with the sixth group.
Additionally, we created a set of validators connected to BDa2 addresses. As mentioned earlier, this address is the connector between groups 2, 4, 5, and 6 miners, and there are 55 validators associated with this address.
data source
We use a public API to retrieve data about TON miners. We share it for the reproducibility of our study and the ease of conducting other analyses:
Raw data
structured data
The script we use to get the data
in conclusion
At least 85.8% of the token supply is distributed among several groups of miners who may be related to each other. A group of people who control these addresses slowly release TON tokens into the market, limiting their supply and providing a low-liquidity effect that has a positive impact on TON prices.
We’re not sure exactly who is managing these addresses, but we assume that at least some of them are working with the TON Foundation:
The organization sent tens of millions of TON tokens to provide liquidity on centralized exchanges. Integration with these exchanges was announced and managed by the TON Foundation
There are very few token transfers from this group of miners to TON core community members
Some addresses from this group are used for test transactions with the TON Foundation, exchanges, and other services;
The current policy of freezing some addresses is in an effort to reduce problems as the whale will have fewer active tokens. In fact, whales voted to freeze some of their addresses.
However, this policy does not solve the problem of blockchain adoption, as the token utility is still very limited. This small group of miners will continue to own a major portion of the supply, and other potential investors will see the risk of token concentration.
As part of the token distribution, these mining groups send funds to the TON Foundation, which already has 570 million TON on its addresses (address 1, address 2). We wouldn’t be surprised if the TON Foundation starts distributing tokens more actively to the community and key ecosystem projects in the future to address blockchain adoption issues.
A few words about the TON Foundation
In the final stages of our research, we contacted the TON Foundation team to get their feedback on our analysis. The TON Foundation reviewed this data to further enhance transparency and engage in public discussions within the community:
We understand the complexity of ecosystems unparalleled and believe it is our mission to help navigate it. A thorough analysis of the TON blockchain by delving into its mining history reveals a lot about the current state of the ecosystem and provides a clear path to what measures need to be taken to ensure increased decentralization . We believe that by working together with all stakeholders, we can achieve this goal. Finally, we call on all users to actively participate in building a secure, transparent and healthy crypto ecosystem. The future of TON is in everyone’s hands.
This article will not fall. Can TON rely on them? On-chain decryption: The same group of TON Foundation miners mined 85% of the supply first appeared on Chain News ABMedia.
