Newton Team's Contributions: From Technical Maintenance to Official Telegram Responses

Introduction: Joining the NEWTON TEAM and Its Mission

Reflecting on my past journey of joining the NEWTON TEAM, it became evident that our mission was to maintain the stability and operation of the TON testnet2 code as a top priority, alongside enhancing developer tools. However, since NEWTON TEAM had no direct jurisdiction over the ton-blockchain GitHub repository, yet the code had to continue evolving, we decided to establish a new organization called NEWTON. To facilitate network-wide updates, we encouraged everyone to use validators developed by NEWTON as the main operational version.

Up until June 2021, the NEWTON TEAM undertook significant maintenance work, including various key developments.

mytonctrl: Automated Node Management Tool

One major contribution was mytonctrl, an automation tool for node installation that could easily set up validators. mytonctrl offered numerous functionalities, such as wallet creation, wallet contract deployment, transaction history retrieval, and even a DNS registration system. Interestingly, the DNS back then was not the same as the modern NFT-packaged DNS we see today.

In addition, mytonctrl could set up validators, liteservers, and liteclients—an essential aspect for accessing all node data and conducting data parsing. To simplify TON mining in 2021, mytonctrl added CPU-based mining scripts and automated computational power tests.

tonmon: Visualizing Blockchain Health

Having nodes and obtaining data was not enough; we needed more visualization tools to observe blockchain health. This led to the creation of tonmon. With tonmon, we could monitor block creation times, shard statuses, dPoS election schedules, global validator counts, active validators, and TON weight per validator. Since TON could be mined during that time, the mining contract status was also displayed on the website. Any anomalies would trigger immediate maintenance on our part.

It is worth mentioning that during the early days, there were very few transactions, with around only 80 validators worldwide.

tonmine: Monitoring Giver Contracts

In addition to monitoring blockchain operation via tonmon, another key tool was tonmine, dedicated to observing TON mining. Initially, the TON blockchain had ten large givers and ten small givers, but by 2021, only ten small givers remained. The tonmine website presented a list describing how much TON each contract mined daily, with an average of 20,000 TON per contract—yielding 200,000 TON daily across all ten contracts.

Interestingly, since different givers had varying numbers of miners, each giver’s mining difficulty varied. Some givers had low difficulty due to lack of miners, while others had extremely high difficulty.

Cross-Chain Bridge

Back then, there were no jetton or NFT standards on TON, but cross-chain compatibility was recognized as a crucial aspect. As such, a dedicated team focused on developing a cross-chain bridge. The outcome was a native TONCoin bridge to ERC-20 tokens on EVM-compatible chains, leading to successful tests on bridge.ton.org. Given its compatibility with EVM, the bridge enabled cross-chain functionality between TON, Ethereum, and BSC.

@cryptobot: Telegram Bot Wallet

In 2021, Telegram mini apps were not yet a thing—only Telegram bots existed. Within the NEWTON TEAM, there was someone dedicated to developing the @cryptobot Telegram wallet, which initially supported Bitcoin, TON, Binance Coin, and Tether USDT. With the advent of Telegram mini apps, the wallet underwent a complete upgrade.

toncenter: Simplifying Blockchain Data Access

With toncenter, developers no longer needed to set up full nodes, research liteclient or liteserver, or worry about serialized data formats. toncenter provided a public API that simplified access to on-chain data for various wallets and blockchain explorers.

explorer.toncoin.org: TON’s First Blockchain Explorer

The first blockchain explorer within the TON ecosystem was the one included in TON’s core codebase, accessible via explorer.toncoin.org. While the explorer was lightning-fast in finding information, it had a downside—much of the data was difficult to interpret for a general audience.

ton.sh: A New Generation Explorer

Since explorer.toncoin.org was challenging to read, ton.sh emerged as an alternative. The author spent considerable time figuring out how to deserialize blockchain data, ultimately succeeding and even launching a public API.

ton.sh became a blockchain explorer with limited features, focusing primarily on checking wallet balances, transactions, and, notably, memos. Memos were critical for early TON users, as without TON Connect or complex DeFi contracts, users relied on memos for command operations—for example, deposit operations on exchanges depended on memos for user identification. Although more advanced explorers like TONScan and TONViewer have since emerged, ton.sh is now part of history, ceasing further development.

TonWeb: The Essential JavaScript SDK

For those joining the TON ecosystem, it was known that TON smart contracts used two programming languages: Fift and Func. Since both were challenging to learn, the NEWTON TEAM worked on TonWeb, the foundational JavaScript SDK that made it easier to create and deploy wallets and conduct transactions.

ton wallet: My First TON Wallet

This was my very first TON wallet, which originated from the Telegram era. Remarkably, it still works to this day.

Open Request to Telegram Team

In summary, the NEWTON TEAM made numerous contributions before June 2021. These included running public liteservers, DHT servers, and archive nodes to maintain the TON blockchain’s stability. Finally, tolya-yanot wrote an open letter to the TON-blockchain team, outlining the NEWTON TEAM’s contributions over the past year and requesting that GitHub organizational permissions be transferred to NEWTON TEAM.

The letter included NEWTON’s two leaders and several other key members.

And yes, Dr. Awesome Doge was also on the list.

At that point, I thought it was merely an open letter—a good effort to demonstrate our contributions to the network, without expecting a response. Surprisingly, on June 30, 2021, Telegram’s official team actually responded.

Thus, a new chapter in TON blockchain history began.

https://github.com/ton-blockchain/TIPs/issues/33