Telegram founder arrested: TON back online after 7-hour block outage, briefly lost consensus

The TON blockchain closely associated with Telegram resumed operation on Wednesday morning after experiencing over seven hours of downtime. The outage was reportedly attributed to an abnormal surge in transaction volume that affected the network's consensus mechanism.

Ton: Surge in Trading Volume Leads to System Failure

According to the TON team, the system failure was triggered by an abnormal surge in trading activity, causing the network to be unable to maintain consensus. Ton explained, "Multiple verification nodes were unable to clear the old transaction database, resulting in a loss of consensus." To address this situation, the team requested verification nodes to restart the system to restore normal operations, and the block production was resumed after 1 p.m.

Ton Halting Block Production is Not the First Time

Internet users commented that this is not the first time the block production has stopped and believe that it may not be able to handle the demands of payments and large-scale applications.

Centralization Issue of Ton Nodes

The Byzantine Fault Tolerant Catchain consensus is the core protocol on the TON blockchain, mainly used to confirm blocks on the main chain and maintain account states. This consensus mechanism requires more than two-thirds of the nodes to agree in order to pass.

In this system, nodes in the network are divided into multiple groups, each led by a main node. All nodes know in advance which group they belong to and who the main node of the group is. Each node has a weight, which can be increased by holding a certain amount of TON tokens. The higher the weight of the node, the greater its influence in the consensus process, but this may also lead to centralization issues.

During the consensus process, the main node sends confirmation messages to other nodes, which include the main node's confirmation of the new block. Other nodes can reply upon receiving the message, indicating that they have accepted the new block. When the main node receives a sufficient number of reply messages, it includes all confirmation information in the new block and broadcasts the block to the entire network.

More information on Ton's consensus mechanism can be found here

The Ton Foundation holds a large amount of tokens: Will TON not fall because of them? Chain Decryption: The same group of TON Foundation miners mined 85% of the supply

Impact on the TON Market

This failure occurred at a turbulent time for TON, as its market value has dropped nearly 30% over the past two weeks, falling to $14 billion.

Prior to this technical issue, on August 26th, there was a surge in activity, during which several exchanges including ByBit and Telegram Wallet experienced interruptions due to the listing of a new token called DOGS. DOGS is a token that rewards users based on their activity on Telegram and was listed on multiple exchanges that day. Despite the token's popularity, it reportedly has no official affiliation with the TON project.

The halt in block production by Ton, occurring shortly after the arrest of Telegram founder Pavel Durov, has raised many speculations. It remains to be seen if the charges by the French government will further impact the Ton ecosystem.

Why was Pavel Durov, founder of Telegram and spiritual leader of TON, arrested? Not about freedom, but about crime and cryptocurrency