Free TON broke its own world record

[Alex077 16064]

Last year, Free TON ran a contest that gained the network over 400 validators. The contest, dubbed “The Crystal Game” (homage to the Glass Bead Game) had validators compete in validation cycles recurrently in order to win the title of “Magister Ludi” as well as token prizes. This year, those same validators (in addition to new ones) entered into a new validator contest: The Rust Cup, which sought to outperform all layer-one blockchain protocols throughput in real network conditions with TON nodes written in Rust.

After quite a heated and frustrating few months for all the race participants (validators) involved, the Free TON Rust Cup reached the finish line with overwhelming success, crowning a brand new, stable network — one that’s faster than any other network in the industry.

At over 55,000 transactions per second (and still increasing), the Free TON blockchain is officially the fastest blockchain in the world. As of Sept. 1, 2021 (one week after hitting 64,000 TPS in one datacenter testnet), the network already reached an all-time high of 55,000 TPS during the final laps of the Rust Cup.

How Free TON broke world records in throughput

The Free TON network has been outperforming all expectations since its launch in May 2020. In just one year, developers have replaced all of the original protocols including the core, which resulted in the first truly end-to-end decentralized, multi-sharded, multi-threaded blockchain. This allowed for the parallel execution of smart contracts, resulting in faster validator rotation and execution parallelism. Multithreading parallel execution enables each shard to scale to execution capacity levels only constrained by node network connections and interfaces.

The Free TON white paper explains why the original code cannot accommodate what Free TON is now capable of and is significantly different from the architecture that Nikolai Durov proposed.

“It’s a very complex engineering task. But we are doing it in record time. The funny thing about all this is that it took us six months to reach 3,000 TPS and two weeks to reach 60,000 TPS,” said Mitja Goroshevsky, chief technology officer and co-founder of TON Labs, during the Free TON AMA session.

The team commented that the numbers could reach a million transactions per second with more validators. 

The Free TON network has not only increased in throughput but also in size. With over 264 million blocks in the masterchain (with an average block time of 0.2 seconds) and over 350,000 accounts, the network sees an average of 2,500 new accounts made each day. This number is set to exponentially increase with the list of pending partnerships the network will be welcoming to its ecosystem this fall. 

 

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