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Web3 services

Although many people refer to TON only as a blockchain, The Open Network is a combination of the following components:

  • A flexible multi-blockchain platform with Turing-complete smart contracts (TON Blockchain)
  • A peer-to-peer network used by Blockchain Nodes (TON Network)
  • A distributed file storage technology (TON Storage)
  • A network proxy/anonymizer layer (TON Proxy)
  • A Kademlia-like distributed hash table (TON DHT)
  • A service for assigning human-readable names to accounts, smart contracts, services, and network nodes (TON DNS)
  • A platform for micro-payments (TON Payments)

This article provides a general overview of TON Services, beyond the blockchain.

TON Network

TON Network is a peer-to-peer network used for accessing the TON Blockchain, sending transactions, and receiving updates. Also, it can support arbitrary distributed services, blockchain-related or not. The cornerstone in TON networking is the ADNL protocol, built on top of the TCP/UDP stack.

The TON Distributed Hash Table (DHT) plays a crucial role in the networking component of the TON Project, as it is used to locate other nodes in the network. You can think of it as a big, persistent key-value data storage. The keys of the TON DHT are simply 256-bit integers. In most cases, they are computed as sha256 hashes of a TL-serialized objects. The values assigned to these 256-bit keys are essentially arbitrary byte strings of limited length.