In-depth analysis of TON inscription ecology

Source: TON Foundation  

1. The inscription revolution from BTC to multi-chain

1.1 Analysis of the driving force behind the explosion of BTC inscriptions

1) Funding basis: Thanks to the improvement of macro capital liquidity + the passage of spot ETFs + the expectation of BTC halving in 2024, the market found the BTC ecological inscription as a tipping point, funds poured in and started a bull market, narrative-led projects and value-led projects projects are competing to be first in the market.

2) Consensus basis: BTC consensus is the most powerful consensus in the field of encryption. This has little to do with the technology itself, and more depends on the historical chronicle of cryptocurrency. Developing products based on the existing strong consensus is much simpler than creating a new narrative or creating a new consensus in product development.

3) Growth expectations: Financial markets look at expectations, and low valuations and imperfect ecology mean huge room for growth. If the hundreds of billions of dollars in the Ethereum ecosystem are used to benchmark the BTC ecosystem, then the expectations for the growth of the BTC ecosystem are still extremely impressive. BTC is embarking on the development path of the Ethereum ecosystem. Speculation has played a driving role, but it has also brought funds and attention to the Bitcoin ecosystem. This boom also attracted a large number of builders to participate, laying an initial foundation for the development of the BTC track.

4) A hundred flowers bloom: Although Bitcoin’s inscription protocol is dominated by Ordinal, there are also many competitors, including Atomic, Rune, SRC20, BRC420, Taproot Asset, etc., each of which has its own solutions. Advantages, application scenarios and fans.

5) Head advantage: Funds and liquidity are mainly concentrated in Ordinals’ head inscription protocol, while other protocols usually only have the first project or a small number of projects with a certain market value and liquidity. This is still far from the situation in the previous bull market where a hundred flowers bloomed.

1.2 Reasons for the continued popularity of multi-chain inscriptions

1) Spillover effect: The transaction cost on the BTC chain, that is, the existence of miner fees, has become an entry barrier for many players. BTC The prosperity of the chain inscription ecology has brought about network congestion, which has increased the cost of mint inscriptions for users. This has caused players to seek other chains to participate in inscription projects, which has also brought about the prosperity of inscription projects on other chains.

2) Low development and deployment costs: The development costs and technical requirements of the Inscription protocol are not high compared to infrastructure and even most Defi projects, which reduces the project team’s cost to a certain extent. Participation threshold. If OP stack achieves one-click chain publishing, Inscription also achieves one-click deployment in many cases using protocol standards. Therefore, for the Inscription Project, the most important thing is the utility empowerment and development planning of the Inscription Project itself, and therefore it is more necessary to emphasize operations and the market.

3) Lottery attributes of Inscription: Users playing Inscription are similar to buying lottery tickets. A large number of bids are emerging in the Inscription protocol every day. Therefore, liquidity is scarce for Inscription. People rarely use large amounts to play the Inscription protocol. Fund flushing, the mentality is more like using a small amount of money to buy lottery tickets, which makes the player's behavior consistent. After diving into a lot of inscription communities, I found that the consensus among most players is - "30U for self-defense and 50U for minimum living security." This mentality represents that individual players actually do not want to miss any potential opportunity to make a fortune.

4) Fair Lanuch’s new narrative: Every asset has meme attributes. If a meme is the sum of a project’s mechanism, narrative, market value, background, and development history, then the most popular method in the secondary market is Fair Launch. From POW to ICO to Fair Launch, retail investors’ pursuit of a minting rights distribution system with equal opportunities to participate has never changed. Compared with Public Sales, Inscription has achieved this to the extreme. Users only need to pay a small amount of network gas to mint coins.

2. Overview of the TON inscription ecology

As an important encrypted public chain, TON has also kept up with the trend in this inscription craze. From December to January, several inscription projects burst out on TON, some of which are inscription protocols and some of which are inscription infrastructure. Some of these projects have achieved outstanding results. They are all building TON's inscription ecosystem and working hard. Ecological expansion in mini program front-end, asset trading, Defi, protocol integration and mini game applications.

2.1 Tonano

Tonano is the first inscription protocol deployed on the TON blockchain: TON20. The casting process of the first TON20 inscription nano (early December 2023) has had a wide-ranging impact on the TON ecosystem. The number of users involved and the network transactions triggered have formed a de facto infrastructure for the TON network. pressure test.

Tonano launched its TON20 inscription protocol on December 5, 2023. Although there was no pre-marketing activity, the minting activity of $nano (the first inscription) still brought interest to the TON blockchain The huge traffic and transaction load caused short delays and network congestion in the processing of network transactions, and Tonano suspended minting activities. After the network was restored, Tonano restarted inscription casting on December 11, 2023, completing $nano’s casting activity in one day. $nano brings over 20 million interactions and 37,000 unique minting addresses to the TON ecosystem.

After the success of $nano’s casting, other TON20 inscriptions were also actively deployed. Bolt20 completed minting on December 16, with more than 31,000 minters. Dedust.io also attracted more than 20,000 minters.

First is first, the emergence of Tonano is a dual establishment of TON users’ minds and the Inscription brand. Looking at the BTC inscription ecology, the sequence has a strong impact on the value of assets and protocols. For example, the huge influence and community consensus generated by ordi as the first BRC20 token is also a huge help for the project to become "Dragon One".

In addition to the mentioned TON20 inscription protocol (deployment, casting, query, transfer), Tonano is also updating the product ecosystem, launching TON20 inscription index query, TON20 inscription trading market and cross-protocol of inscriptions on the TON chain. Asset Bridge. Tonano’s Marketplace has over a million dollars in trading volume, which provides the necessary liquidity for TON20. The cross-protocol asset bridge can realize asset swaps between TON20 and other inscription protocols and Jetton tokens, making a broader inscription ecosystem possible.

Tonano will launch miniapp in 2024Q1 to further supplement its shortcomings in user usability, consolidate its ecological status, and promote inscription to be easier to use and more used. In the future, Tonano will continue to focus on technological innovation, invest in the construction of the TON ecosystem, and use the high concurrency and low-cost technical characteristics of the TON blockchain combined with Telegram's 800 million user platform resources to promote the large-scale application of the TON network.

2.2 Gram20

Gram20 protocol is the second inscription protocol on TON. Different from TON20, this protocol has greater ease of use and more functions. Gram20 is the first inscription protocol that uses the Telegram applet front-end to perform the deployment, casting, and transfer of inscriptions, and has launched a trading market to provide users with trading services. The Gram20 protocol supports limiting the time interval for users to mint inscriptions, imposing penalties for early minting, and setting the starting time. This is an improvement over the basic inscription protocol.

The Gram20 team conducted good publicity before the casting, opened the casting on December 22, 2023, and used the Odaily platform to have conversations with OKX Ventures and TON DevRel managers. For the sustainable development of the protocol, Gram20 imposed a certain fee on the casting of inscriptions on its own platform, which reduced the enthusiasm of community members to participate. After seven days, the inscriptions were finally cast on December 29. The charging design of Inscription product design has brought backlash, not because the mechanism is bad, but because it is inconsistent with the mainstream narrative of freemint emphasized in the current Inscription market.

Although gram’s minting charges a protocol fee for minting, the platform promises that these funds will be used to meet future economic incentives and maintain the sustainability of the GRAM project, including 50% of the funds used to buy back GRAM tokens. currency, and the other 50% of the funds will be used for infrastructure construction, ecological incubation investment, liquidity management, team building and market promotion. Subsequently, Gram20 opened the OTC market with the help of the Umbrella platform, and through publicity with multiple institutions and KOLs, it attracted the attention of users and conducted gram inscription transactions on Umbrella.

Gram20’s team is highly professional in market making and is supported by a variety of resources, including joint meetings and promotions with exchanges, VCs and KOLs on market announcements. As a latecomer, it has gained good reputation. Market attention, business cooperation, promotion of exchange listing, cooperation with Umbrella to launch OTC market first, possessing protocol asset reserves, leaving room for subsequent operations.

Using the TG applet as a starting point for the product has staggered the direct competition with TON-20 to a certain extent in the early stage. It is also a very user-friendly product implementation that is in line with TG’s planning for the applet. Method; limiting the interval of mint commands and imposing penalties is a good way to increase user participation on the platform, avoiding plunder and sneak escape by the scientist group; and using the TON smart contract to charge users, it achieves an innovative sense POS chain ICO, namely Inscriptions Coin Offering; but unlike ICO in the traditional sense, the token exchange ratio obtained by the end user can be determined by the project party.

Gram20 has launched a $200,000 Ecosystem Grant Program in terms of ecological development to help Gram20 through wallet integration, browsers and indexers, creating the basis for a stronger ecosystem; developing Inscription's Bridge, DEX using the Inscription ecology to build Defi; build mini games for Telegram Mini Apps, and use games to bring rich functions to Gram20.

2.3 TONOT

TONOT combines the concept of inscription with the social attributes of Telegram to create fair inscriptions for every community user. By binding and activating Telegram accounts, TONOT ensures the authenticity of Cast Inscription users. Each activated Telegram account bound address can mint 500 TONOT inscriptions, and each new invitation can mint an additional 50 inscriptions, with a maximum limit of 2,000.  

TONOT was released on January 5, 2024, and launched the Inscription Protocol. The extremely popular user participation was unexpected by the project team, causing problems with its front-end page. After being repaired, TONOT was re-released on January 11th, with full minting completed in nearly 24 hours. $TOT itself also brought a lot of interaction to the TON ecosystem. The 61,751 independent minting addresses broke the previous record held by nano. This is a rare level of participation in any blockchain project.

This is achieved through its unique invitation mechanism and casting mechanism. TONOT’s invitation mechanism requires users to be associated with Telegram accounts. TONOT’s casting mechanism can only be achieved through the Telegram applet, and there are certain restrictions. The total amount minted by the user within the time period. It is also difficult for scientists to cheat by using scripts. TONOT effectively protects the interests of community users and provides a truly fair and transparent currency recording experience - the real FairMint. TONOT does not charge agreement fees and allows all users to engrave TOT inscriptions for free, which greatly increases users' enthusiasm for participation.

So what practical applications can TONOT achieve? According to the official product plan, TONOT will achieve:

1. Staking and mining: users can pledge TONOT inscriptions and mine tokens from other projects within the TON ecosystem (similar to Binance Launchpool), Provide additional profit opportunities and obtain the continued growth dividends of the TON ecosystem.

2. Decentralized Identity (DID): Users can use TONOT inscriptions to generate exclusive decentralized identity attributes (DID). DID can be used for identity verification, digital signatures, encrypted emoticons, and more, making TONOT the social currency of Telegram.

3. In-game token consumption: With the development of Telegram App, TON games will become TON’s core business. TONOT plans to cooperate with more than 50 games in 2024 to enrich TONOT’s application scenarios. In future GameFi cooperation, TONOT will be used as a consumption token, allowing users to purchase virtual items and upgrade equipment within GameFi in the TON ecosystem, encouraging users to play and earn for free.

TONOT is currently the first social inscription on the TON blockchain, with more than 60,000 holders. The integration of TONOT with Telegram ensures the fairness of the inscription, and by binding to the Telegram account, TONOT also ensures the authenticity of users. TONOT's product plan hopes to expand the application scenarios of inscription through inscription pledge, in-game currency and paid Telegram groups to help TON's network ecology.

2.4 FairTON

FairTON is a fairness-first, community-native and full-lifecycle project launch platform. FairTON's positioning is not limited to the BRC20 inscription protocol. It focuses on the "localized" innovation of the TON blockchain, abandons the Achilles heel of off-chain indexers, and implements the primitive operation of inscriptions at the smart contract level.

Fairness first

The popularity of BTC Inscription has extended the wave of fair launch to the entire cryptocurrency ecosystem. Most Inscription project developers copy the off-chain indexing scheme of Bitcoin Inscription. Inscription’s technical solution is a compromise within the limitations of Bitcoin Script’s capabilities, rather than its essence. Fair token minting that everyone can participate in is in line with the spirit of the original Bitcoin. The off-chain indexing solution not only brings liquidity fragmentation to the public chain ecology, but also brings hidden dangers to asset security. People have witnessed multiple security incidents during the development of Bitcoin Inscription.

Community native

The community is the key to the early start of the Web3 project and the basis for sustainable development. As the world's most popular social software platform, Telegram has 800 million monthly active users, far exceeding existing participants in the cryptocurrency industry. With Telegram’s native TON support and extensive social network, FairTON aims to simplify the entry of more individuals and projects into the Web3 field.

Full life cycle

FairTON is not only committed to innovative project launch methods, but also provides a series of token management solutions, including highly customizable vesting tools, anti-rug mechanisms to protect participants’ funds, and liquidity tools for projects.

JettonX

FairTON launched JettonX (Jetton eXtension) for the first time in the TON ecosystem, which is fully compatible with the existing Jetton token specifications. Jetton (Russian Token) is an ERC-20 token model on TON, which supports the creation of equivalent tokens such as USDT. This is currently the most widely adopted token standard in the TON ecosystem. FairTON can customize project launch methods such as fair token casting, lottery casting, proof-of-work casting, social fission airdrops and retroactive airdrops. The tokens after the project is launched through FairTON can be seamlessly connected to the liquidity and on-chain infrastructure of the entire TON ecosystem.

2.5 TownSquare

TownSquare is committed to promoting the mass adpotion of the TON blockchain, effectively integrating Telegram’s extensive user base of 800 million with the inherent privacy, transparency, openness and sovereignty of the web3 world Get in touch. The project focuses on developing necessary infrastructure and key applications within the TON ecosystem. TownSquare plans to launch the first decentralized, open-source inscription indexer. In addition, the team is actively committed to the exploration and development of protocols and application tools to achieve fair and safe asset insurance.

The data of the inscription is on L1, but the calculation process and data results are on the index, and the index is essentially an off-chain server, no different from the web2 website server. Inscription's currency holdings and transfer records are all stored in a website server. Once there is a problem with the index service, the assets based on this index service will have problems, which may even lead to the collapse of the entire protocol ecosystem. Previously, there was a bug in the index of a certain protocol, and additional issuances were issued out of thin air. The data between the two index parties could not be aligned, causing the entire protocol to stagnate, causing huge losses to the community. Therefore, for the TON public chain, the decentralization of the inscription index must be achieved.

The decentralized index is similar to the nodes of the public chain, the code is unified, and the data obtained by anyone downloading and running is consistent. There will be no problem of joint fraud by several indexes. Data security is high. The protocol can be quickly upgraded by simply upgrading the decentralized index code in a unified manner, which will greatly improve the flexibility of the protocol.

Open Source Infrastructure

With reference to the development of the BTC ecosystem, Inscription's infrastructure includes indexer, wallet support, marketplace, casting tools and data analysis. After nearly a year of development, the BTC ecosystem has blossomed, and TON is currently in the ascendant. Fortunately, Tonano, Gram20, and TONOT launched in the pure community have received good feedback in the early stages.

However, if the inscription ecology wants to develop in the long term, the construction of infrastructure is essential. Different inscription standards have brought about the fragmentation and closure of the index. Fair participation itself is part of the inscription narrative. TownSquare is about to Launch a fully open source third-party indexing service to lower the threshold for potential inscription project parties to participate. TON ecosystem developers no longer need to develop an index by themselves. They only need to run the open source decentralized index program, which can be used very conveniently. The decentralized index planned by Unisat and IERC-20 also has an incentive mechanism, which makes more people willing to build indexes and further enhances the degree of decentralization.

Automated services

The inscription itself is a kind of PoW (Proof of Work). I have observed it in the release of Tonano and Gram. Many scientists and programmers have an asymmetric advantage over ordinary retail investors. TownSquare will also launch a bot that can automatically create inscriptions to make the inscriptions more fair.

I look forward to TownSquare being able to bring protocol standards to TON’s inscription ecosystem, standardize the inscription protocol on TON and provide users with a fairer way to participate in the ecosystem.

3. Summary

The current inscription projects of various chains generally have some shortcomings:

1. Completely Free Mint leads to the lack of sustainability of most projects . A few Inscription projects with sufficient funds will go to the secondary market to repurchase chips, bear the market-making costs themselves, and list on the exchange, which itself is a huge investment. Most start-up project parties also fell into an unsustainable dilemma after the lively inscription activities because they did not have token incentives and sustainable fundraising capabilities. Therefore, as an inscription project, the relationship between fair launch and sustainable development of the project should be weighed.

2. The copycat inscription protocol technology and gameplay are not innovative enough. Most inscription imitation disk projects copy the data format and gameplay of BRC20 without considering the differences between the Bitcoin network and other general smart contract networks. Among the cookie-cutter Inscription Protocols, standing out requires reinvention in technology, token economic model, and even narrative level.

3. The inscription market is seriously fragmented. Most implementations of the Inscription Protocol adopt off-chain indexing solutions, resulting in the fragmentation of on-chain and off-chain states; over-reliance on centralized services limits the circulation and exchange of Inscription assets; the lack of programmability of smart contracts makes it difficult for the Inscription Protocol to utilize the blockchain composability and interoperability.

The good news is that the TON Ecosystem’s Inscription project has given its own solutions in different aspects to address the above problems:

1. Make full use of Telegram’s social infrastructure , innovative social inscription gameplay

The Telegram applet can quickly respond to a large number of access requests, and provides a built-in official wallet @wallet or TON network wallet TONSpace for seamless on-chain transactions; Telegram accounts are naturally resistant to witch attacks, and are an effective way to prevent scientists from "jumping in", "swiping accounts" and occupying network resources. Making good use of Telegram's mini-programs to provide Web3 users with a better product experience and at the same time achieve the conversion of Web2 users is a better way to achieve mass-adoption. Protocols such as Gram-20, TONOT, and FairTON combine the advantages of Telegram and TON networks. The small program products they build are highly innovative inscription protocols, and they have also achieved success to a certain extent. For example, the NEAT inscription project, which is publicly supported by NEAR officials and founder Illia, has a final minting volume of 24,600 addresses, while a purely community inscription project like TONOT is still operating without official endorsement. The minting volume of 61,751 addresses was achieved. In an era when users and traffic are king, TON users using Telegram as a carrier have high authenticity and low acquisition costs, making them unique in today's blockchain.

2. The Inscription protocol adds smart contract functions to bring programmability to Inscription

At the technology sharing meeting of the TON network, I emphasized that TON The flexibility of smart contracts. Through smart contracts, the protocol can directly add protocol fees to the contract like Gram-20 to achieve sustainable development of the protocol. At the same time, the protocol can also help users pay Gas Fee to truly realize Free Mint. FairTON launched the JettonX token framework, which is fully compatible with the ERC20 standard Jetton on the TON blockchain, providing customizable solutions for various innovative project launch mechanisms. Under the premise of using TON network smart contracts, flexible and diverse payment methods and activation methods are completely achievable and full of imagination.

3. The TON blockchain inscription ecology is in the ascendant

Similar to the BTC inscription protocol, a number of inscription protocols have emerged on TON, including Tonano, Gram -20, TONOT and FairTON, etc., focus on on-chain inscriptions, TG applets, social attributes and on-chain smart inscriptions. Inscription-based trading, lending, and stablecoin projects on BTC are gradually emerging. At present, TON's inscription ecology is beginning to take shape, and various companies are also exploring the inscription ecology to bring more utility to their inscription products.

The above is my public analysis report on the TON public chain Inscription ecology. On behalf of the TON Foundation, I officially state that I do not have investment advice on the entire content.

reference:

https:// twitter.com/thecryptoskanda/status/1725276441812832617

https://twitter.com/cheng_shutong/status/1726427906237399333

https ://tonano.io/

https://gram20.com /

tonot.io

https://twitter.com/fairton_xyz

https://twitter.com/ton_square