TON blockchain slows to a halt as Ordinals-inspired protocol sees surge in activity

The Open Network ( TON +0.82% ) blockchain saw long delays in transaction processing earlier this week after the introduction of a Bitcoin Ordinals-inspired protocol that spiked in activity. 

According to messages from TON developers and users in Telegram, issues started on Tuesday. By Thursday afternoon, over 2.5 million transactions were pending, according to data from the dTON bot that monitors the state of the blockchain.

The speed on the blockchain fell to less than 1 transaction per second, according to dTON. That's a fraction of the maximum speed of TON that was reportedly recorded around 100,000 TPS during a "public stress test" in early November.

The congestion has been so severe that the most popular wallets for the TON cryptocurrency, Wallet and Tonkeeper, temporarily paused services.

"Producing over 2 million transactions increased our network usage by 61 times within just half an hour," says a post in the TON Community Telegram channel with over a million subscribers.

TON Ordinals

The congestion followed the launch of Tonano, a service for creating blockchain inscriptions inspired by Bitcoin Ordinals and using the TON20 token standard on the TON blockchain. Tonano launched on Monday but had to halt minting on Thursday, the project said on X.

According to a technical report posted anonymously on the Telegraph blog platform on Thursday, the reason for the congestion was attributed to "validator nodes nodes running on weak hardware."

"These validators rented hardware for low load with no provision for load growth. Since the network had been running low load for the previous months, this was not a problem. As soon as the load increased by 50-100 times in 30 minutes, these validators started to slow down the whole network with them," the post reads, adding that a patch has been issued to fix the problem, and in the future, harsher penalties would be introduced for lagging validators.

Inscriptions and the way they have flooded the blockchain with data has been a contentious topic in the Bitcoin community, where the format was first introduced. Recently, the format was introduced on the Polygon blockchain as well, where it caused transactions volumes to spike but did not halt the blockchain.

Telegram's blessing

TON blockchain started as a project piloted by the team behind Telegram, crypto's favorite messaging app. The white paper was authored by Nikolay Durov, brother of Telegram's founder and CEO Pavel Durov. 

The project raised $1.7 billion in a closed token sale in 2018 but was sued by the Securities and Exchange Commission for an alleged unregistered securities sale. Telegram ended up settling with the SEC, and in May 2020, the company officially abandoned the project.

The project’s developer community and Telegram's former technical partner, TON Labs, picked up the code and developed two competing projects, Toncoin (now TON) and Free TON (now Everscale).

In September, Telegram officially endorsed TON and built the wallet for the coin into the interface of the messenger app for users outside of the U.S.