An extraordinary transaction load brought down the TON blockchain. The disruption was interrupted by the arrest of Pavel Durov, the head of Telegram. Durov helped develop TON.
The TON blockchain is back online after a mere seven-hour shutdown on Wednesday morning, Asian time.
The TON team attributed the outage to an unusual spike in transaction load, which affected the network's ability to maintain consensus.
“Many validators were unable to clean up the old transaction database, leading to a loss of consensus,” the network said. X.
Increase in activity
The team called for validators to restart the system at 4am UTC to restore normal operations. TON, with a market value of $14 billion About 18% slipped According to CoinGecko, in the last seven days.
On August 26, there was an outage due to a surge in activity, including several exchanges Bybit And the Telegram wallet faced disruptions after listing DOGS, a token on the TON blockchain.
dogsTelegram, which rewards users based on their activity, saw listings on multiple exchanges that day and fell only 0.8% in the last 24 hours. Despite its popularity, DOGS is not an official TON project.
The TON Foundation did not respond to a request for comment.
The disruption came amid heightened interest in TON's association with Telegram, whose founder and CEO Pavel Durov was arrested on August 24 by French authorities.
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In 2018, Durov and his brother Nikolai developed TON to integrate blockchain technology with Telegram. The acronym was originally Telegram Open Network, but is now short for The Open Network.
Durov was detained
Durov was detained by French authorities after his private jet landed at Le Bourget airport near Paris. He came from Azerbaijan with his bodyguard and crypto influencer Julie Vavilova. Media reports.
The investigative unit of the French judicial police, Offmin, issued an arrest warrant stemming from suspicions that the Telegram platform facilitates criminal activities including drug trafficking, fraud and child exploitation, insufficient regulation and lack of cooperation with law enforcement.
Telegram denied suspicions that Durov was involved in wrongdoing on the site.
“It is absurd to claim that a platform or its owner is responsible for the misuse of that platform,” the company said in a statement. Advertisement On Sunday.
TON and Telegram
Durov, A Russian-born billionaireA long-time figure in the tech world.
He founded Telegram in 2013 and left Russia in 2014 after refusing to shut down opposition groups on his previous platform, VKontakte, which he sold.
In 2018, the Durov brothers raised $1.7 billion through a private sale of TON tokens (then known as Grams), one of the largest cryptocurrency offerings ever.
Stepping away
In October 2019, the US Securities and Exchange Commission filed a lawsuit accusing Telegram of conducting an unregistered securities offering.
In May 2020, Telegram stopped development of TON. It agreed to pay an $18.5 million settlement and return funds to investors.
Although the Durov brothers officially stepped down in 2020, a small team of open source developers continues to work on TON, sticking to the original design created by its founders.
Although neither Pavel nor Nikolai are involved with the project today, there is a TON Swara In support of Durov.
In an open letter, it said his arrest was an attack on the right to freedom of expression.
“We call on France to immediately release Mr Durov and to protect the social media platform's right to freedom of expression, privacy and private life of its users,” the network's team said.
Callan Quinn is Asia Correspondent for DL ​​News. Got a tip? Email her [email protected].
