In summary
- The Open Network, the Blockchain behind Toncoin (TON), has gone down for the second time in 24 hours, producing no blocks for over three hours.
- The problems are attributed to Dogs (DOGS), a new Cryptocurrency minted on TON, which became very popular and is now among the top 100 coins and tokens by market capitalization.
- The network went down on Tuesday night and stopped processing transactions for hours, and is now down again at the time of writing.
The Open Network—the Telegram-linked blockchain behind Toncoin (TON), the 10th-largest cryptocurrency by market cap—has gone down for the second time in 24 hours, failing to produce blocks for over three hours at the time of this writing. And the problems are being blamed on a meme coin.
Dogs (DOGS), a new cryptocurrency minted on TON, has exploded in popularity—and is now among the top 100 largest coins and tokens by market cap, according to CoinGecko. Its current price is $0.00145, with a trading volume of nearly $1.9 billion over the past day.
The token launched on Monday with an open airdrop claim to 10 million users of a Telegram-based mini-app. But the hype around the launch put pressure on TON, leading to congestion and eventually a crash: The network went down on Tuesday evening and stopped processing transactions for hours.
A TON spokesperson told Decrypt that everything was back to normal by Wednesday morning, and confirmed that the DOGS token claim was responsible for the network issues. But now, at the time of writing, the chain hasn’t processed blocks in over three hours. Network representatives initially pointed to block production issues shortly after 1 p.m. ET.
“Block production issues began at 19:19 UTC. The outage appears to be due to heavy load attributed to DOGS token minting. TON Core is working on a solution,” the network’s official account tweeted. “We will continue to update you on the situation as it evolves. Users’ crypto assets are not at risk.”
A new TON Status Twitter account, which was shared by the main TON account, called on network validators to update their nodes before a reset.
TON was also hit by the news that the CEO and co-founder of encrypted messaging app Telegram was recently arrested. French authorities arrested Russian-born Pavel Durov outside Paris last Saturday, alleging that he had failed to moderate criminal activity on the popular privacy-focused messaging platform.
Durov was released from custody on Wednesday and taken to a court for questioning, according to reports. Telegram originally developed TON but abandoned the project in 2020 due to regulatory scrutiny, at which point community developers continued to build the ecosystem and evolve the technology.
Telegram is separate from TON, but the cryptocurrency is popular among the platform’s users: content creators on Telegram can earn the currency and send it to others through the app. Telegram is also now using TON to share advertising revenue with channel owners, and it launched an off-chain coin called Stars that is connected to TON.
Meme coins and tokens are a big part of the crypto ecosystem, but they are highly volatile assets that often disappear as quickly as they are created. They are often based on internet jokes, especially dog-based memes, and are popular among those looking to make a quick profit.
DOGS is currently the second-largest meme coin created on TON (by market cap) after Notcoin (NOT), the token of the popular tap-to-earn Telegram game created earlier this year.
Edited by Andrew Hayward
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