Orbs, TON Foundation launch TON.vote, an on-chain governance platform for the open network

It has been a while since we last covered The Open Network (TON) Foundation, a fully decentralized layer-1 blockchain designed by Telegram to onboard billions of users. At the time, the TON foundation launched a $250M TON ecosystem fund that invests in strong teams with the vision to build on The Open Network.

Fast forward about a year later, The Open Network announced today the launch of TON.vote, a new decentralized and on-chain DAO governance platform built exclusively for the TON ecosystem. This new platform was established with the help of Orbs and aims to emphasize the use of web3 standards such as decentralization, transparency, and security. 

According to TON, many projects on The Open network [will] require governance activities, emphasizing the need for decentralized and transparent solutions, unlike projects like Snapshot.org, the TON.Vote voting is decentralized and trustless.

Governance is the lifeblood of decentralized environments and projects. It helps democratize control of a protocol and ensures broader community participation. Removing the option for people to make unilateral decisions is essential when dealing with sensitive topics, including:

• managing a project’s treasury
• token grants
• token distribution 
• the future direction of the protocol

Rather than the TON Foundation, the community should be responsible for making these crucial decisions. In addition, everyone should be able to participate in governance without worrying about censorship. 

Ensuring all voting occurs on-chain through smart contracts is the next logical step in the evolution. Furthermore, it lets anyone verify the individual votes by community members and ensure everything is accurate.

Under the hood, TON.Vote leverages Orbs’ Layer-3 technology. The Orbs Guardians are an extra assurance layer and independently verify voting accuracy. That way, no one can tamper with the votes, yet the Orbs Guardians can cross-check all data.

TON-based contracts are unable to read historical account states. Orbs Guardians’ Layer-3 capacity overcomes that hurdle without compromising decentralization or security. In addition, independent validators can use the TON RPC API to verify valid votes. 

The TON Foundation has begun integrating TON.Vote as the new standard for governance-related activities. Moreover, Orbs Guardians have interacted with the Foundation to ensure the correct display of contract data.

A first governance vote via TON.Vote saw the participation of 1.1 million TON tokens. Community members can vote on whether they want to see genesis mining wallets have their tokens frozen after four years of inactivity. 

Interacting with the TON.vote platform is straightforward. Users can connect their wallet – Tonkeeper, OpenMask, MyTonWallet, TonSafe, Tonhub, or TON Wallet – and use their TON token balance to weigh in on this – and future – proposal(s).

Projects and dApps can integrate TON.Vote with ease. The TON Foundation will provide developer documentation to make this process more accessible. 

Currently, voting occurs through TON transactions. That will eventually be replaced by participation through wallet signatures. The platform will also welcome NFT voting – based on rare traits – in the future. 

TON became the first non-EVM L1 chain for Orbs to explore its innovative L3 technology. In addition, the L3 infrastructure player aims to become a key TON ecosystem participant and introduces new use cases for existing and upcoming protocols. 

Founded in 2017, Orbs is a public, open, decentralized blockchain infrastructure powered by a network of permissionless validators using PoS (proof-of-stake) consensus.

Using a multi-layered blockchain stack, Orbs acts as a separate decentralized execution layer operating between existing layer one and layer two solutions and the application layer.

This approach opens up a new horizon of capabilities for Web 3.0 segments, including DeFi, NFTs, and GameFi, as it delivers a decentralized backend for smart contracts.