Decentralized blockchain aims for Ethereum and DEX compatibility with new wrapped token

A highly scalable, decentralized blockchain platform’s new Ethereum-compatible wrapped token aims to provide it with access to liquidity-rich decentralized exchanges. Free TON is a multi-blockchain platform that can handle thousands of transactions per second thanks to its dynamic sharding mechanisms, which create new shards as needed. As a result, it is the fastest blockchain available, according to developers.

Despite that, the Free TON blockchain is still in the early stages of attracting DApp developers to its platform. Even with its scalability, an important task at this stage is to bring more liquidity to the platform. To do that, developers have announced the launch of Wrapped TON, a tradable TIP-3 token built on its native TON Crystal token.

With the ability to be transferred to and from the Ethereum network freely, the project’s developers see Wrapped TON — or WTON — as having two main purposes.

• First, Wrapped TON will bring the Free TON blockchain access to the liquidity available on decentralized exchanges, according to core developer Broxus. With the assistance of the newly formed Free TON DeFi Alliance, Wrapped TON has debuted on Uniswap, where the WTON/USDT trading pair is now available. At the time of writing, Uniswap had a 24-hour trading volume of $1.24 billion.
• The second goal of Wrapped TON is to promote the fledgling but high-performance, highly scalable, and secure blockchain project within the larger Ethereum community.

In the longer term, this will bring the Free TON project more users and transactions, as well as more projects, initiatives and integrations, Broxus believes. This in turn will, it hopes, lead to higher demand for the project’s core TON Crystal token.

TON Crystal tokens can be transformed into WTON and transferred to and from Ethereum with Broxus’ TON Bridge or via the Crystal Wallet. The fee is largely the cost of the Ethereum gas needed to complete the transaction.

Coming back strong

The Free TON blockchain project rose from the wreckage of Telegram’s proof-of-stake TON blockchain, which collapsed in June 2020 after an ICO lawsuit by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. That forced the messaging app company to end its involvement with TON development, as well as return $1.2 billion of the $1.7 billion it had raised in an ICO to fund development.

That cost TON its most valuable asset — which wasn’t the money. Telegram’s plan was to give TON access to its 400 million monthly active users, who would be able to use it and its Gram tokens for in-app payments, among other things.

But with the TON community unwilling to abandon the nearly complete blockchain, the Free TON project — which had launched a month earlier as an infrastructure provider — took over development. By December 22, the TON community decided that there was sufficient decentralization — including more than 400 validators — to launch the mainnet. The Free TON project has been quite active since then, starting with its acquisition of the Dune Network distributed app platform via a community merger in February.