TON returns to its Web3 roots

About a month after the major ton.org redesign, The Open Network’s website has received another noticeable update. This time, the homepage brings together the main ways TON can be used: Telegram-native use cases, including anonymous numbers, usernames and gifts, developer tools, and a separate Decentralized Internet section.

The latter is especially interesting. TON was originally envisioned as broad infrastructure for building its own decentralized internet. TON DNS, TON Proxy, TON Sites and TON Storage were all described by Nikolai Durov in the original whitepaper. But over the past few years, amid the clicker boom and the rise of Telegram Gifts, this part of the network has almost faded from view.

Out of this whole stack, .ton domains remain the closest thing to a user-facing product. Webdom acts as a marketplace for them: users can buy, sell and manage domains, as well as track detailed market analytics. For now, .ton domains are still mostly used as human-readable wallet addresses, although they can also serve as addresses for decentralized websites.

For those who want to try launching a TON Site themselves, ton.run already has a detailed guide. And if you do not want to deal with hosting, you can upload files through @ResiStorageBot instead. The catch is that accessing such sites still requires setting up TON Proxy or installing Resistor’s Tonnet Browser, where the proxy is built in by default.

We want to believe that this section appearing on the homepage is not accidental — and that Telegram may soon truly return to TON’s roots and breathe new life into the ideas that were there from the beginning.

@thedailyton