The Open Network (TON) blockchain is back online after experiencing issues that caused its network to stop producing new blocks for several hours.
“TON is now producing blocks normally! We are back online,” the TON Foundation reported on its X page on Aug. 28 at 5:30 am UTC.
Transactions and block production data on The Open Network (TON) blockchain. Source: Dton.io
According to data from the TON transaction scanner Dton.io, the TON blockchain is back to producing new blocks, with the network counting 231,879,089 blocks at the time of writing.
TON block production outage followed the DOGS airdrop
The latest update from TON came two hours after the TON Foundation officially reported experiencing a disruption in block production due to the abnormal load on the network. The outages were allegedly caused by unusual network congestion caused by the airdrop of Dogs (DOGS), a new TON-based memecoin designed to embody the spirit and culture of the Telegram community.
“Several validators are unable to clean the database of old transactions, which has led to losing the consensus,” TON noted.
The foundation mentioned that TON Core issued a call to validators to restart at 4:00 am UTC to reestablish the consensus.
“Rest assured your transactions will be made, and no cryptocurrency assets will be lost due to the issue,” the TON Foundation added.
Source: TON
What is Dogs, and why did it trigger issues on the TON blockchain?
Officially introduced in July 2024, Dogs is a new memecoin running on the TON blockchain and is marketed as the “most Telegram-native memecoin.” The utility token was inspired by Spotty, a mascot promoted by Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov, who was arrested in France on Aug. 24.
The launch of Dogs has driven enormous congestion on TON due to users’ rising interest in the TON ecosystem. The official Dogs channel on Telegram, the Dogs Community, has amassed nearly 17 million subscribers in less than two months since its launch, showing massive popularity among users.
Dogs Community’s official account on X has gathered 3.9 million users since the first post was published on July 11.
Dogs Community’s first post on X. Source: Dogs Community
The official listing of Dogs on major exchanges like Binance, Bybit, OKX, Bitget and Gate came the next day after the first reports on Durov’s arrest in Paris.
Related: TON Society issues open letter to France urging Pavel Durov’s release
The TON blockchain subsequently encountered massive network congestion as users rushed to claim airdropped Dogs tokens onchain. On Aug. 26, multiple users reported issues on the Wallet in Telegram, which came from an unusual spike in network activity.
Four million users claimed Dogs token via Wallet in Telegram
According to a spokesperson from Wallet in Telegram, a third-party app that allows Telegram users to buy, sell and store cryptocurrency, four million users claimed their Dogs token via the wallet after Dogs held its token generation event on Aug. 26.
“This resulted in near-unprecedented levels of onchain activity — the claim process generated a peak of over 67,000 transactions per second, far exceeding the previous all-time high we experienced during Notcoin’s token generation event,” the representative told Cointelegraph on Aug. 27.
The spokesperson mentioned that Wallet in Telegram decided to partially disable some features to provide stable service during the onchain claim process. The representative added:
“Of the 4 million users that claimed to Wallet, 1.6 million have already performed an activity with their tokens – whether this might be sending their tokens to another Telegram user, depositing them into a Wallet Earn campaign, or swapping to other cryptocurrencies via the P2P market.”
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