2025: What a fucking year!

Before saying anything I want to thank you deeply for your trust. Trust is the most valuable and scarce asset and I've been blessed by your trust more than I deserved it. Thank you

I started 2025 lonely and a bit drunk. And now I'm lonelier than I've ever been and a bit more drunk. Anyway, here is a recap of Tonnel this year.

On 4th of January, I tried buying some Vintage Cigars and after a couple of encounters I decided I'd rather just click a button and pay for my gift and not to talk to someone for a purchase. So I started designing a system and built it on the 5th of January and at 11pm of same day I tested my first purchase and after a couple of hours of sleep I launched the Marketplace on 6th of January

I was releasing new feature every couple of hours and I was barely sleeping or eating and after a few days I made a silly mistake and when I was asleep someone found a bug and exploited it and stole more than 10K TON(TON was more than ~5$).

I asked TF to give me a loan or something so I can cover the losses and refund our users. After an hour and a discussion inside TF, they said NO (Fuck them)

Meanwhile Ton Community and specially subscribers on the @stenka started donating me money which I still can't believe it(To each one of them I express my sincere gratitude and utter respect) and I also sold some of my assets and were able to refund users and relaunch the marketplace within a few hours.

After that incident I thought no one would trust my product but for some reason people even started using it more and trusting Tonnel Marketplace with larger funds. Gladly ever since we had no major security incident.

Everything was going superb in the next few months while we were achieving milestones one after another and even Pavel Durov started using and purchasing gift actively in the Tonnel Marketplace(Currently Pavel has the largest TON balance among the users of Tonnel)

In late May and early June, Thousands of IPs located mostly in Ukraine started their DDOS attack on my APIs and for several months I was trying to find a way to stop them. They never asked for money or anything, so this expensive operation and their motivation will remain a mystery to me. I tried different approaches to keep the platform alive and at the same time fight those attackers.

These expensive attacks definitely worked and I lost many users and honestly my self-confidence was also damaged. I felt like an idiot and I thought of closing the marketplace multiple times during that period. To be honest I believe those attacks were one of the main reasons that ruined the momentum of Gifts and stopped the market to grow further.

Fortunately, recently the scale of those attacks became smaller and my experience in dealing with them improved so we didn't have any significant downtime in the past few months.

Thank you for reading this long not well-written post. And Thank you so much for your immense support and love throughout this year. And I apologise to anyone if I insulted or treated them unfairly