TON Foundation Launches ETH-TON Bridge

Summary:
• Bridges have shown susceptibility to exploits, losing hundreds of millions of dollars. To tackle this, TON held a hackathon in 2022.

The TON Foundation, an organisation representing The Open Network’s (TON) developers and supporters, has announced the launch of a two-way bridge allowing the easy exchange of Ethereum’s ERC-20 tokens for TON’s natively wrapped fungible tokens (Jettons). Wrapped Bitcoin (wBTC), Tether tokens (USDt), USD Coin (USDC), and Dai (DAI) will initially be supported on the “first unlimited bridge.”

It’s been less than a month since Telegram added support for sending Tether (the largest stablecoin) on the Tron blockchain, and now it has launched a bridge between $TON and $ETH. The update broadened the chat app’s crypto payment options, permitting TRC20 purchases, swaps, and P2P transactions, as well as the fee-free sending of USDT between users.

A new way to transact ERC-20 tokens on TON

The goal of the bridge is to provide an easy-to-use interface for executing transactions involving both Ethereum and TON. Initially, users will be restricted to bridging a maximum of four different assets. The foundation wanted to be sure that the unlimited bridge was secure, so in 2022, they held a hackathon and invited white-hat hackers to test the security of the bridge. In the future, the TON Foundation plans to make additional tokens accessible for the bridge in a relatively short amount of time.  The TON Foundation believes that the launch of this bridge will attract a large number of new users to the TONNE ecosystem.

The Open Network (TON) is a ground-breaking system that aims to consolidate many blockchains and the Web2 internet into one unified system. TON’s layer-1 design can enable millions of transactions per second with near-instant confirmation times by scaling to 2^32 workchains, each of which can be further subdivided into up to 2^60 shardchains.