Free TON Launches First Contests, Opens a Discussion Forum, Announces zkSNARKS
May 21, 2020. The Free TON Community made several live announcements over the last week-and-a-half.
Contests
First, the community introduced their long-awaited beta token distribution plan on May 12 during a live podcast. As of its launch on May 7, 2020, initial token distribution will be based on merit through online contests (see “Distribution”) to help drive and develop the community, and thereby the network.
Initial validators are being asked to come up with a solution for an enhanced node deployment infrastructure, an intellectual log dashboard with analytics, extended metrics for node monitoring, and among other criteria, a means to automate election participation. Based on the number of completed tasks, tool accuracy, code and description quality, and work-as-advertised performance of its functions, winners will be selected by a jury.
There is also an active contest for developers designed to isolate the best possible Soft Majority Voting (SMV) smart contract specs. Mitja Goroshevsky, CTO of TON Labs stated, “The SMV smart contract is of paramount importance to Free TON as it will provide a mechanism for all governance and voting on the network.”
Finally, there is a contest for the best design of mechanics to orchestrate a successful airdrop. As the first of a series of airdrop contests, this one asks members to create the best possible approach to adding users to the network while filtering out security issues such as fake bots and fake accounts. Quoting Ron Millow, Free TON contributor and head of business development for TON Labs said, “Growing the community is essential. Airdrops must be implemented with a clear, simple, and secure path to enrollment for new users.” Proposal submissions are encouraged to find the best, most secure, and simplest way for new users to sign Free TON’s Declaration of Decentralization, sign up to chat groups, and spread the word.
Discussion forum
In addition to numerous Telegram messenger groups and channels, Free TON opened an online forum for discourse, contributions and suggestions regarding contests that will distribute tokens. Anyone can join and participate.
=nil; Foundation incorporates zkSNARKS into Free TON
The first major protocol change is on its way with zkSNARKS being enabled for usage from inside the TonVM. =nil; Foundation took the obligation to provide such an improvement with it’s internal =nil; Crypto3 team.
Mikhail Komarov, =nil; Foundation chairman commented, “We believe feature-rich applications are crucial for Free TON to become more widespread. Such an extension will enable Free TON to provide additional transactions privacy, extend gaming applications and much, much more.”
The implementation, which has Groth16 construction inside, is coming with two modifications: TonVM extension with a special zkSNARK instruction, which would require to update the node software to enable new feature support, and the zkSNARK implementation compiled right into TonVM Assembly language just as it is done in Ethereum.
A comprehensive presentation of zkSnarks can be viewed here:
👉https://youtu.be/cU09aroktaA.
Reminder: On May 7, 2020 Free TON was launched by an independent group of developers and validators from the blockchain industry.
