As a highly-anticipated blockchain platform, TON (The Open Network) has shown explosive growth in the past few months. However, in the process of development from small games to DeFi, what is missing on TON?
The explosive growth of the TON ecosystem
Over the past few months, we have witnessed amazing growth in the TON ecosystem. Projects such as Notcoin, Dogs, Hamster Kombat, and Catizen have been listed on Binance, reportedly bringing millions of new KYC users to major exchanges. This is undoubtedly one of the largest scale applications in the blockchain space in recent years, whether we admit it or not. This growth shows that the TON ecosystem has great potential and appeal, attracting the attention of many users and developers.
Problems facing TON
Despite the large number of users, TON’s total value locked (TVL) is still relatively low. Moreover, we have not seen many DeFi protocols emerge on TON, which has raised concerns and debates about the low user value on the TON chain and its incomplete infrastructure. To better understand TON’s challenges in the development of DeFi, we need to review the history of DeFi and explore the new paradigm of asynchronous blockchains.
A brief history of DeFi
The DeFi ecosystem flourished during the "DeFi Summer", mainly on Ethereum. Developers leveraged the Ethereum ecosystem and smart contracts to create a variety of innovative financial applications and services. Smart contracts, as basic building blocks that can be combined like Lego blocks, provide the necessary network effects for the rapid spread of decentralized financial applications.
Ethereum's composability paradigm enables various DeFi protocols to interact with each other in innovative ways. Key financial primitives such as atomic swaps, flash loans, rehypothecation, and borrowing platforms demonstrate how different applications can be layered on top of each other to create complex, versatile financial products. However, as DeFi matures, the limitations of Ethereum's synchronous model become increasingly apparent, primarily regarding scalability and high transaction fees.
Asynchronous blockchains: a new paradigm
Unlike Ethereum's synchronous blockchain, asynchronous blockchains like TON adopt an actor model approach. This shift results in several fundamental structural differences. In Ethereum, atomic operations are possible because each transaction can be treated as a single unit operation and all transactions operate on a shared global state. However, in TON, transactions can be processed concurrently across multiple actors or smart contracts, with different actors holding isolated states.
Despite the theoretical advantages of asynchronous blockchains in terms of scalability, the lack of atomic swaps makes TON a very difficult platform for DeFi development. Without atomic operations and sequential processing, liquidity in lending protocols becomes very difficult, no matter how challenging the DeFi Lego blocks are.
The Challenge of DeFi Composability on Asynchronous Blockchains
Maintaining composability on asynchronous blockchains introduces complex challenges for DeFi applications. First, transaction coordination becomes complex because multiple actors need to coordinate to reach a consistent state at a specific point in time. Second, state consistency is also an issue because in a distributed environment, race conditions can arise if multiple transactions attempt to update overlapping state. Finally, failure handling also becomes challenging because it is difficult to guarantee that all parts of a transaction either succeed or all fail in an environment where state is distributed and operations are non-atomic by default.
Pixelswap: Bridging the Combinability Gap
To address the challenges of DeFi composability on asynchronous blockchains, Pixelswap proposes an innovative solution. Pixelswap's innovative design addresses these challenges by introducing a distributed transaction framework designed specifically for the TON blockchain. The architecture follows the BASE principles and includes a Saga transaction manager and multiple transaction executors.
The Saga transaction manager is responsible for managing the entire transaction lifecycle, breaking it down into a series of smaller, independently executable steps, each with its own compensation actions when it fails. The transaction executor is responsible for executing the assigned tasks within the transaction lifecycle, ensuring powerful, scalable, and asynchronous transaction execution through parallel processing and modular design.
in conclusion
In summary, the future of DeFi needs to adapt to the paradigm shift from synchronous to asynchronous blockchains while maintaining and enhancing key principles like composability. Pixelswap emerged on the TON blockchain as a groundbreaking solution that elegantly combines robustness, scalability, and composability. By ensuring seamless interoperability and powerful transaction management, Pixelswap paves the way for a more dynamic, scalable, and innovative DeFi ecosystem.
However, the development of the TON ecosystem still faces many challenges. In addition to solving the problem of DeFi composability, it is also necessary to increase user value, improve infrastructure, attract more developers and investors, etc. Only through continuous innovation and hard work can TON stand out in the highly competitive blockchain field and achieve sustainable development.
