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What is the TON protocol

TON (The Open Network) is a fully decentralized layer-1 blockchain designed for fast transactions and scalability. It was originally designed by Telegram and later developed by the open TON Community. TON uses a unique sharding mechanism to achieve high throughput and low latency.

TON employs a Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism where validators stake TON coins to participate in block production and validation. The network is designed to support millions of transactions per second through its dynamic sharding system.

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What is the TON API

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Both TON API v2 and v3 are supported

Chainstack supports both v2 and v3 APIs:

  • TON API v2 — node API that can also run JSON-RPC methods.
  • TON API v3 — an indexer.

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TON pricing is the same for full, archive, v2, v3

There’s no difference between a full node an archive node in data availability or pricing. All data is always available and all node requests are consumed as 1 request unit.

The TON API allows developers to interact with the TON blockchain to build decentralized applications. It provides methods to read data from the blockchain, send transactions, and interact with smart contracts.

To communicate with the TON blockchain, an application must connect to a TON node. Chainstack provides managed TON nodes that developers can use to access the network.

When communicating with a TON node, clients use HTTP requests to interact with the API, which follows RESTful & JSON-RPC principles for most operations.

Note that interactive examples are REST on each of the TOP API reference pages, but the Chainstack TON endpoints also support JSON-RPC calls. Each of the pages has a JSON-RPC curl example counterpart

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How to start using the TON API

To use the TON API, you need access to a TON node.

Follow these steps to sign up on Chainstack, deploy a TON node, and find your endpoint credentials:

1

2

3

Now you are ready to connect to the TON blockchain and use the TON API to build your decentralized applications.