Third-party TON team to launch L2 chain

A group of developers affiliated with The Open Network on Telegram plans to tap into Ethereum with a Polygon-powered solution. 

On Tuesday, the team led by Pavel Altukhov unveiled the TON Applications Chain, or TAC, at the Ethereum Community Conference (EthCC) in Brussels, Belgium. The new L2 will allow EVM-based decentralized applications (dapps) to connect with The Open Network (TON).

EVM or Ethereum Virtual Machine is the staging area for most, if not all, Ethereum-based smart contract developments. It enables builders to design tools compatible with Defi’s largest chain. According to Altukhov’s group, the upcoming layer-2 network will be designed using Polygon’s Chain Development Kit (CDK) to expand TON’s ecosystem beyond the private messenger app.

Alenka Shmalko, ecosystem lead at TON Foundation, and Antony Tsivarev, TON Foundation’s director of ecosystem development, stated that the TON Foundation was not behind TAC. The disclaimer was shared in response to several reports claiming that the TON Foundation was the collective mind behind TAC. 

The news echoes a growing trend of entities shipping layer-2 networks created to scale Ethereum (ETH) by leveraging the behemoth blockchain’s security status while offering much cheaper transaction fees than ETH’s mainnet.

In April, crypto exchange OKX launched its Polygon CDK-based L2 network, dubbed the “X Layer.” Coinbase also has a layer-2 called Base.

TON and Telegram continue to claim the crypto spotlight in recent months, as the social network has allowed developers to create dapps directly on the platform and access a 900 million global user base.  Mini-games like Notcoin and Hamster Kombat have stormed defi spaces, quickly onboarding hundreds of millions of users through gamified tasks. 

As these mini-games grow in popularity, questions abound about whether the trend is sustainable and will continue to attract users to Web3.