Preamble
As decided by the community in September, we have now completed the foundational stage of FreeTON development and are currently entering a growth phase. The community has made several strategic decisions: including strengthening global governance and pausing the distribution of tokens to initial members. But we need to continue evolving our governance protocols and take some decisive steps in order to increase the liquidity in the network.
For almost 1.5 years, FreeTON has been experimenting with different decentralized governance formats. Some experiments went very well — e.g., the DeFi Subgovernance, whose solutions enabled the DeFi Alliance to bring in almost $30M of liquidity to the network; Grand Bazar - one of the industry’s higher-end NFT marketplaces; the Browser Extension contest that led to the appearance of several good alternatives to Metamask, etc. — and some did not: unsuccessful partnerships, overpriced contests, monopolized subgovernances, etc.
One of the lessons we have learned together is that technology alone is not enough to be competitive. However, technology backed up with significant liquidity can work miracles. For instance, although they are not as technologically advanced, several other blockchains grew much faster than FreeTON in valuation, primarily due to having significant liquidity inflows.
Last but not least, the negative legacy left by the Telegram Open Network’s litigations has prevented the network’s token from getting listed at top trading platforms and ranking websites, hampered our ability to forge significant partnerships, and, in general, been a formidable obstacle to business development.
With that in mind, we believe that our project must pass through a series of reforms in order to join the ranks of the top 20 most valued networks.
This document will highlight the most crucial challenges facing the network and propose solutions that will help us reach more advanced levels of development.
Summary
The FreeTON DeFi Alliance proposes to address the existing issues and upcoming challenges and requests additional funding for the implementation of:
- Project rebranding;
- Supply and demand balance;
- Collaboration with top exchanges;
- Consistent business development;
- Developer attraction;
- Integration and technical support of new partners;
- Givers reform;
- Better communication with the external world.
Givers
FreeTON has a system of givers with unallocated TON Crystals, that constitutes a massive risk to the long-term market cap of the project. The community responded to the idea of redistributing those tokens among additional target givers without enthusiasm.
We propose burning 3 billion TON Crystals from the referral giver.
Collaboration with top exchanges
There have been many decentralized attempts to list TON Crystals on different exchanges and information services (e.g., CoinMarketCap), which has led to a great deal of confusion among those services and uncertainty about who is entitled to speak on behalf of FreeTON.
To make TON Crystals available to a broad audience, while also ensuring liquidity, and a fair market price, the community needs to achieve listings at top centralized and decentralized exchanges.
However, collaboration with exchanges is a complex process requiring compliance data, project positioning, and integration support, among other things.
Moreover, not all listings are suitable for our network. Some may even harm the reputation of the token. In the Alliance, we are consulting with experts to forge a proper listing strategy.
Last but not least, top exchanges do not list tokens for free. Alliance members have covered the listing expenses for some time, but additional resources are now required to reach the most critical trading platforms.
The Alliance has all the necessary experience to coordinate community resources and to facilitate collaboration with top exchanges. We propose to allocate 250M TON from FreeTON for the activities outlined in this section and below.
Business development
A purely decentralized approach to partnership management has brought us some results and around 30 partnerships. Still, there are a few challenges that we need to address in order to grow much faster and attract more robust and successful partnerships:
- Bias or lack of sufficient business skills of some of the FreeTON community members;
- Misunderstanding of FreeTON goals, capabilities, and positioning;
- Inability to duly support partners at the integration stage and KPI fulfillment control at the later stages;
- Multi-window discussions with the same partners in some cases have led to a loss of credibility and significantly worse conditions for FreeTON;
- Potential partners have no clear point of contact where they can obtain all the necessary information.
Thus we propose:
- To engage a significant amount of community members who can initiate, close, and follow through on meaningful partnerships that bring value;
- That the Alliance set up processes that will allow us to filter incoming leads and assign responsible community members to help partners to join the FreeTON family;
- That the Alliance perform regular retrospective analyses on partner contributions;
- To maintain a shared list of all potential partners, grouped by industry and vetted by a reputable person from this industry;
- To introduce a motivation system for the best-performing community members in business development.
Crystal Hands
The vast market demand in blockchain/crypto tends to spoil large liquidity providers and makes it their market. We developed a long-term “Crystal Hands” program with unprecedented benefits in order to be competitive with the other top blockchain protocols.
To become a member of this program, one has to bring at least $10M to the FreeTON ecosystem and keep it locked for at least eighteen months. All payments are vested and carefully calculated by professional portfolio managers with liquidity balance considerations in mind.
The motivation program that would support such a massive inflow of liquidity will require an additional pool of 280M TONs in order to operate successfully.
Developer/entrepreneur attraction and motivation
The current contests-only system has produced some strong results with a solid DeFi, NFT, and developer experience infrastructure. However, it has not been able to fulfill all the development needs of the ecosystem.
If we take a look at how other networks attract developers, they typically use grant systems. We think we should experiment with grant-like (tailored to Free TON ideology) solutions for professional teams scaling their businesses on top of the infrastructure created within the FreeTON contests framework.
Competing with top networks out there will require us to attract many more professional developer teams than we have today.
To be clear, we recommend keeping the current contest system for developing ecosystem infrastructure under an open-source license and targeted funding for those teams who have successfully implemented this infrastructure in their projects and brought significant value to the network.
The Foundation
After thorough research of competitive blockchain projects, we have realized the necessity of a dedicated public, not-for-profit, structure to serve as the front desk for the outer world. Please familiarize yourself with the Foundation – a group of FreeTON enthusiasts powered by popular influencers, experts, leading market institutions, and network facilitators.
Unlike the DeFi Alliance, aimed at filling FreeTON with liquidity, the Foundation will take care of partner support, the popularization of the project, communication with all kinds of counterparties, education, and the promotion of FreeTON values and ideas.
Although it is a non-commercial institution, the Foundation will require some funding in order to function. With our current vision of its primary objectives, we recommend allocating 50M TON for this activity. The Foundation from the very beginning will be structured as a DAO.
Integration and technical support
FreeTON is not a simple blockchain to integrate. Even with a whole set of tools developed by TON Labs, Broxus, and other community members, newcomers still need support and advice on where to start and access the best practices.
Although FreeTON has demonstrated sufficient progress in documenting crucial parts of the system, there’s still a lot to do. Unfortunately, we see no other choice than to still provide human support to new projects coming to the ecosystem.
To grow the credibility of developer teams towards FreeTON and reduce the entry barrier for them, we propose сreating a working group under the Foundation that prepares, consolidates, translates, and updates the documentation on the key systems and tools used in the FreeTON ecosystem.
Better communication
Community efforts in communication with the press have been quite controversial. The Alliance has made its own efforts to make messages from FreeTON more consistent.
We believe that establishing a clear channel for the press to get official comments on the Foundation activity will help establish FreeTON communication consistency moving forward.
These communication volunteers shall collect news and updates across FreeTON and will ask for different SG and community members’ (CMs) comments.
Thus, we propose to allocate a sufficient budget for data collection, rewriting, copywriting, preparing and distributing press releases, organizing our own press briefings, and representing FreeTON at external events under the guidance of the Foundation.
Initial members unvested tokens DAO
The community took a decision to suspend vesting for FreeTON initial members. We consider that those unvested tokens should bring some rewards from staking. We propose to launch a DAO which will select community DePools and stake TONs on behalf of all initial and new members.
Next steps
To commence the changes above, we propose to:
- As part of the Growth phase prepare and launch Stage 2 of the DeFi Alliance and allocate an additional 250M TON for this;
- Prepare and launch the Crystal Hands special project and allocate 280M TON for farming and vested bonuses to enable a significant inflow of liquidity;
- Prepare and launch the Foundation and allocate 50M TON for its purposes;
- Burn 3B TON from the referral giver;
- Select a new brand name and begin the rebranding process ASAP.
Annex 1. FreeTON DeFi Alliance contribution
In this Annex, you will find the core contributions of different Alliance teams.
Development
Console utilities
Alliance developers have introduced convenient console utilities that help in secure funds management, like ton-msig or ton-distribution.
End-user products
TON Crystal Wallet
With the start of the network, the community required a simple yet efficient wallet to operate with TON Crystals. In order to meet this need, we ported the original Gram Wallet developed by the Telegram team to support FreeTON on three desktop platforms: Windows, macOS, and Linux.
Later on, we added the support of easy staking/withdrawal from depools and TIP-3 tokens to support TON Bridge operations.
However, although solid from a UI perspective, this wallet was tough to maintain due to the peculiarities of its source code organization. That’s why we decided to entirely revamp the wallet core and release a new version, based on the Chrome platform.
Since then, many features have been added to the wallet, including the convenient representation of FreeTON accounts architecture, multi-seeds, multi-keys, multi-contracts and multi-accounts, built-in web3-like transport to let web dApps interact with FreeTON without friction, increased security, etc.
In our plans, we want to release TON Crystal Wallet on other mobile and desktop platforms and fine-tune its UX/UI even further.
TON Bridge
If the native blockchain currency is its blood, then the external liquidity coming into it is the oxygen needed for a young project to grow. With the most liquidity concentrated in Ethereum and other EVM networks, the most obvious way to attract it is to let it flow without friction from those chains to FreeTON and back.
This is exactly what TON Bridge does.
An award-winning masterpiece of blockchain technology, with over 200k code lines, it is now one of the most advanced bridges in the industry. The first development iteration brought slightly under $30M to the FreeTON ecosystem without a functioning DAO.
With a new version currently in the works, the bridge will become a fully decentralized system containing a DAO, staking, relayers and liquidity management modules that will connect to multiple EVM networks at once. It will unlock the next growth level for the whole FreeTON network, with a potential $1B of liquidity inflow over the next year.
The Bridge has been fully audited by reputable companies and will be published in open-source.
Wrapped TON
For convenience and uniformity of operations, we have introduced a Wrapped TON or WTON TIP-3 token. This facilitates seamless exchange and bridge operations, in a manner similar to what WETH and WBTC do for the Ethereum network.
One can comfortably wrap/unwrap TON Crystals at wton.io using their TON Crystal Wallet extension.
TON Scan
Award-winning blockchain explorer TON Scan lets users easily track their transactions, dig into FreeTON blocks and messages, and monitor validators’ performance. Moreover, it is the only tracker able to monitor TIP-3 token transactions.
TON Swap
TON Swap is an AMM-based decentralized exchange that combines the best practices of Ethereum DEXes with the unique opportunities presented by FreeTON. With TON Swap, you can easily exchange TIP-3 tokens, stake liquidity in pools, participate in farming programs and even build your own token.
TON Swap TVL has exceeded $27M, which would put it in 65-th place in the DeFiPulse ratings, right after the Gnosis, if the former was listed there.
B2B products
TON API
As we said before, it is not easy to integrate FreeTON. Although multiple SDKs allow interaction with FreeTON, even a simple operation of sending a transaction from a wallet becomes complex in terms of development.
To speed up FreeTON market penetration, including listings on different wallets and exchanges, we have developed an industrial TON API. This simple and lightweight product lets you operate your TON accounts seamlessly with any multi-signature scheme of your choice.
In the recently released fourth version of TON API, we have built-in a lite node that allows interaction with FreeTON without relying on a GraphQL or ADNL connection to external nodes.
Last but not least, TON API is now available in open-source, and anyone can install it on their server to ensure maximum security and reliability.
Nova
Broxus Nova is an additional abstraction layer that allows business customers to operate with different kinds of cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin, Ether, ERC20 tokens, and TON Crystals.
With the introduction of TIP-3 tokens to TON API, now Nova users may enjoy operations with selected TIP-3 tokens. This will increase FreeTON accessibility for numerous wallets and other systems built on top of Broxus Nova.
Development and infrastructure utilities
TIP-3/Broxus
After Mitja’s initial TIP-3 token standard proposal, it became apparent changes were necessary. Following a thorough review, we have put together a standard upgrade named TIP-3/Broxus that is currently used by all Broxus DeFi products, and has become the de facto network standard.
This upgraded standard contains significant improvements in terms of gas management, connectivity, deployment checks, etc.
Nekoton
This fast, reliable, and robust wallet library written in Rust has many features for building decentralized wallet systems. In particular, Nekoton serves as the underlying core for TON Crystal Wallet, making it so stable and reliable.
Locklift
Locklift is a development environment aiming to help you with FreeTON contracts development. With Locklift, you get:
- Network management for working with any networks (main, test, local, …)
- Automated contract testing with Mocha
- Handy wrapper around FreeTON smart contracts
- Custom givers support
- Keys management
- External script runner that executes scripts within the specified environment
With Locklift, your smart contracts development process will evolve to the next level.
TON Indexer
TON Indexer is a lite-node SDK that developers can use to build solutions that independently interact with FreeTON. In particular, TON Indexer is used in TON API and TON Pool to ensure their stable working.
Liquidity
Most of TON Swap’s liquidity has been attracted through our network of contacts. We will continue our daily funds consulting and market-making duties to stabilize the TON Crystal rate and avoid huge fluctuations.
Our current focus is to attract Tier-1 VCs and the world’s top liquidity providers to subsequent phases of our liquidity farming programs.
Listings
The DeFi Alliance has facilitated the launch of trading and market making on major exchanges that cover over 95% of daily trades, according to Coingecko and CMC. Currently, we coordinate listing on at a Tier-1 licensed European trading platform.
Partnerships
The Alliance has managed to establish partnerships with FRAX and Stasis (EURS) and initiated early discussions of potential cooperation with Curve Finance, Tornado Cash, and Balancer Finance senior executives
It has also managed to forge a partnership with Cointelegraph, which has reached produced some fascinating results:
- About 150 FreeTON publications that have been translated eight languages (including Chinese, Korean, Turkish, etc.);
- The preparation of the Cointelegraph Consulting Report to support a new phase of FreeTON development. CT will distribute it across the professional market players;
- The launch of a series of special projects to draw attention to the network.
Besides CT, we have also created partnerships with Changelly, Lumi Wallet, and Freewallet - one of the industry’s most significant wallets with a multi-million user audience.
PR & Events
With the help of the Alliance, FreeTON has partnered with SiGMA Conferences for the best possible representation at AIBC Dubai. This Autumn, FreeTON representatives will also be working at AIBC Malta.
Also, thanks to its efforts and financing, FreeTON will be presented at Dubai Blockchain Week (WOW Summit and AIM conference).
Last but not least, we have co-organized and financed the Top TON Startup competition, an event to bring new developers to the FreeTON ecosystem.