TON Developer Numbers Surge Over +500% in the Last Year: Ton Foundation Q2 2023 Report

 Key highlights:

• TON has seen explosive developer growth over the last year, with monthly active developers increasing by more than 500%.
• A variety of hackathons, challenges, meetups, and grants are fueling this surge in interest.

The TON blockchain has seen tremendous growth over the past year, with developer activity skyrocketing over 500% since Q2 2022. This surge in interest is highlighted in the Ton Foundation’s latest quarterly report, showcasing the project’s impressive traction despite the crypto bear market.

Accelerating Developer Activity

The report highlights the tremendous surge in monthly active developers working on TON-related open-source repositories on GitHub:

Despite the crypto winter, developer activity has risen 5x year-over-year. This growth vector is a bullish signal for the project’s fundamentals and technical maturation.

TON’s documentation on GitHub saw over 300 commits from 32 contributors last quarter. The community is actively improving available resources.

Total Monthly Active Developers of TON

The TON Developers Chats have also expanded significantly:

Reaching over 9,000 members across language communities, TON is building a thriving grassroots developer community worldwide.

TON events stimulating engagement

The TON Foundation organized several high-profile events that helped drive developer interest:

• Hackathons: The March DoraHacks event catalyzed a spike in engagement that has been sustained since. Upcoming hackathons like Hack-a-TON will likely produce similar results.
• Challenges: The wallet, TVM, wiki, and web app challenges offered juicy prize pools to incentivize builders to showcase their skills and create valuable tooling for TON.
• TON Breakfasts: Grassroots TON breakfasts were hosted in over 20 cities globally, spreading awareness and strengthening local communities.
• TON Hubs: The EU and Asia hubs organized numerous meetups, workshops, and networking opportunities to support regional growth.

Ramping up onboarding resources

To help developers build on TON, the project expanded educational resources and documentation:

• Awesome Lists curating helpful tooling, libraries, and learning materials were launched for Tact and TON development.
• Video Courses were created explaining FunC, Blueprint, Fift, and Tact basics for beginners.
• TON Documentation was revamped on docs.ton.org, with 35+ new/updated pages and tutorials.
• Community Contributions through open-source pull requests helped improve the docs, with 32 contributors participating.

TON Grants – Funding the ecosystem

The TON Grants program distributed around $66,000 in Q2 to support 34 projects, receiving as many proposals weekly as the March hackathon spike.

The grants help fund ideas that meaningfully contribute to TON’s growth, including wallets, developer tools, DeFi protocols, NFT platforms, and more. Some noteworthy examples:

• Wagmi11 – Crypto & sports betting marketplace
• A6g Events – Ticketing protocol
• Tact Foundation – Tooling/docs for Tact language
• Questbook – Telegram & TON grants management
• Nujan IDE – Online IDE for TON development
• TON Wallet for KaiOS – TON wallet for 160M+ mobile devices

The grants program relies on community testing/feedback and evangelizing funded projects for adoption. By participating, you directly help shape TON’s evolution!

Blazing fast speeds attract developers

What is it about TON that has supercharged developer interest? A key drawcard is TON’s exceptional transaction speeds.

In Q2, the network achieved over 55,000 transactions per second (TPS) during a stress test. This mind-boggling throughput is multiple orders of magnitude above most other blockchains.

TON accomplishes these lightning-fast speeds via sophisticated sharding. This technique partitions the network into smaller segments called shards that each handle a portion of transactions.

Sharding enables near-limitless scaling. It allows TON to expand its capacity without compromising on speed.

These incredible speeds make TON highly appealing for building demanding real-world apps. The network can comfortably handle the transaction loads required by large-scale commercial applications.

The road ahead

The market capitalization of TONcoin has grown from around $1 billion in 2022 to over $4 billion currently. Going forward, the pace of development and adoption of decentralized applications on the TON network will be a major driver of the TON coin’s price performance.

Despite the crypto bear market, TON has bucked the trend and achieved staggering developer growth. With an expanding toolkit, motivated community, and supportive Foundation, the project is primed for greater adoption and impact.

As the report concludes, TON’s future lies in the hands of its builders. By collaborating to improve the ecosystem’s capabilities and accessibility, the community can drive mainstream adoption.