On February 22, validators and users of The Open Network (TON) held a community vote that suspended 171 inactive miner wallets for four years if they had never made an outgoing transaction. This accounts for 1,081,389,416 TON worth around $2.58 billion at the time of publication, representing over 20% of the total TON token supply.
The vote was held following a request from the TON Foundation for miners to show their activity by making at least one transaction on the TON blockchain before December 17, 2022. 24 of the 195 inactive wallets were activated, as a result, leaving 171 addresses to be suspended per the vote.
According to developers, TON has been made available for mining since July 2020, using “Giver” smart contracts to ensure decentralization via Proof of Work while remaining a Proof of Stake blockchain. The suspension of these wallets is intended to make tracking the total circulating supply of TON easier and ensure that the active community of developers for the open-source project can continue to grow and thrive.
The TON community has long speculated that access to some inactive wallets may have been lost, leading to concerns over the amount of unutilized TON in circulation. As TON is used as a gas fee required to access decentralized services on the network, this increased uncertainty can be disconcerting for participants. The project was abandoned by Telegram three years ago after the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission accused the company of breaching security laws regarding their $1.7 billion initial coin offering in 2018 and has since been taken over by community developers.
