Dear diary, today...

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5 May 2024

This could have been a story about us playing in The Open League. But it turned out that not the game itself, but its aftermath became epic. Here's what we've learned about the TON blockchain over these months: things you might have missed and how we all should navigate through this.

First, about the TON that sets records and impresses with theory.

At the end of 2023, the TON blockchain set a world record by processing 104,655 transactions per second. This is 5.5 times the performance of Visa, 20 times that of Mastercard, and 14,000 times that of Bitcoin. There seems to be no doubt about the authenticity of the record: it was tested under the supervision of Certik, known for its reputation in the crypto sphere. The tests focused on the blockchain's core, allowing for impressive results with minimal infrastructure impact.

And, as usual, there comes a defining «but». Despite high performance metrics (in theory), TON faced real challenges — namely, a large number of users. This revealed issues such as temporary system failures and overloads caused by massive events like the launch of TON20 or mass-sender tests, which even led to the blockchain being blocked or stopped for several days.

Thus, records are records, but practice fell short.

What does all this mean?

Simply put, the Open League itself became a test of performance. This competition-experiment among projects was organized by the Ton Foundation to test the blockchain under real conditions in an engaging way.

Each team faced the task of showing effective metrics for the leaderboards. This is the main essence of the competition.

It all started with a pilot season. A test of a test, so to speak!

Each of the teams received almost exact instructions, which had to be followed to not drop out of the next season of Open League, and these instructions had to be integrated into their product.

Here arose a huge problem with the methodology of counting metrics, as the projects differed in their method of operation, idea, or even distribution of their tokens. And the formulas changed several times, and with each change, the balance shifted, putting some projects at the top of the table and others, conversely, at the bottom.

For instance, Ton Raffles could not afford to burn tokens. Every Lock created by a user on the platform during the Open League harmed our position. Unfortunately, we did not mention one of the utilities — staking, which when actively used by users, dropped the project down the tournament table.

After the pilot — obviously, the first season, which was not much different from the pilot. But already in the second season...

The methodology radically changed — now, what was «harmful» to do for the product in the pilot season became a useful action again, fitting into the rules of The Open League. Such periodic changes force projects to completely restructure their plans and start all over again.

You might have noticed that some teams preferred not to bother and just focused on metrics to win prizes, while others integrated useful actions and utilized the full potential of their ecosystem.

We strongly recommend studying the methodology of counting blockchain activity to better understand what the obtained metrics mean for each of the projects. Pay attention to the number and study the usefulness of the mentioned smart contracts for each of the projects -> https://ton-org.notion.site/TOL-Season-2-Methodology-5640dba44c0946d388a5aeb16f26ba87

The sharp increase in blockchain activity (including thanks to Open League) also reflected on Ton Raffles.

We are not against it (rather only «for» it), but predictably faced consequences. Which we dealt with all of April. Adding to the absurdity was that solving some problems required a workload from other teams in the ecosystem. Because of this, we were constantly in a suspended state of waiting.

At the end of 2023, at one of the AMA sessions, we announced that we plan to launch 200 campaigns on our platform within a year. And then everyone thought we were joking 🙂 It hasn't even been half a year, and we launched 220 tokens and several dozen NFT launches, with a total raise of more than 5.2 million TON.

The site tonraffles.app had 1.7 million unique visitors in the last 30 days.

For comparison: the TOP-1 launchpad platform in the world has 1.2 million users in a quarter (3 months). So, our platform is already facing problems and requires better solutions, better servers, and support than the TOP-1 launchpad on all other blockchains.

Such an increase in user numbers could not but affect the operation of our service and the data providers we use.

In April, our team was fully immersed in optimizing and refactoring the Ton Raffles platform, which explains the decrease in marketing activity during this period.

We have expanded our staff with several specialists and made significant changes to improve the platform's operation:

Code optimization. Almost every section of the platform is updated (or will be updated) to adapt to the increased number of users. Some sections are expecting major changes.
Technology updates. Implementation of new technologies that significantly improve the overall performance of the platform.
Update of ALL smart contracts. After validators voted to reduce network fees, another «case» occurred. Now we face the task of integrating a gas management function into absolutely every smart contract to promptly provide you with the best fees at the next validators' vote for changing fees.
Development of new services and micro-services. For example, creating a service for caching metadata and developing an intelligent proxy service that checks the status and optimizes the choice of data provider. Here, our task is to provide each user with accurate blockchain information as quickly as possible.