With decentralized finance growing fast enough that mainstream financial companies are taking notice, it’s a good time to be able to offer an alternative to Ethereum.

The platform on which most of the DeFi business is built, Ethereum, is struggling under its weight. Compounded by the explosive growth of NFTs, Ethereum is proving too slow and far too expensive to handle DeFi as congestion drives the per-transaction gas price through the roof.

Which is why a project like Free TON that says it can offer not only faster and cheaper transactions but the room to grow without running into trouble is in a good place.

Free TON rose from the ashes of Telegram’s TON blockchain project after U.S. regulators forced the messaging app firm to walk away. That left Free TON developers with a very decentralized project — a state many competitors in DeFi space are working towards.

And with dynamic sharding technology that creates new shards — essentially mini-blockchains for specific smart contracts subdivided from the master blockchain — as needed, its developers say it can handle thousands of transactions per second, and has plenty of scalability to spare. It is, they say, the fastest decentralized protocol available.

And that’s before the Free TON stablecoin set for release this summer gives the blockchain the capacity to make even microtransactions affordable.

Faster, cheaper, stabler

A partner to the TON Crystal token, the Free TON stablecoin will be one of the most important additions in what developers say is shaping up to be a very significant summer for the protocol.

Backed 100% by locked Ether, the stablecoin will offer liquidity providers the possibility of strong returns.

More importantly, the stablecoin represents “the deployment of a true layer-two solution” that can solve the cost and speed issues that must be overcome vital if DeFi is to successfully “develop into the egalitarian financial model it was intended to be,” according to TON Labs, the core developer of the Free TON project.

With costs lowered even more and speeds up dramatically, the developers say the new stablecoin will make very small payments feasible, opening up significant microtransaction use cases like payments, royalties, and e-gaming. It also opens up the ability to handle recurring subscriptions.

More insights from Free TON

More decentralized, more connected

One strength that Free TON brings to the table of decentralized finance is that by the circumstances of its founding after messaging service Telegram abandoned the project, it is starting out a lot more decentralized than many other DeFi projects.

Notably, fully 95% of its TON Crystal tokens have not been distributed — unusual among DeFi projects that generally are birthed by a developer that slowly seeks to decentralize authority — while giving themselves a substantial pot of tokens that provides both a windfall and a powerbase.

That huge pile of available tokens makes Free TON a prime destination for yield farming on a mass scale — a major growth engine for DeFi. This fits well, as the Free TON network is currently being used primarily for yield farming using cryptocurrency exchange facilitator Broxus’ TON Bridge to Ethereum.

That bridge is Free TON’s first, and once the decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) has been fully audited and launched, the bridge will be completely decentralized. A second bridge is in the development pipeline under the new community governance mechanism created in October. This would connect Free TON to Polkadot, a blockchain aimed at interconnecting other blockchains to enable a decentralized internet, or Web 3.0.

Other projects in various stages of proposal or implementation include a decentralized exchange, or DEX, and a self-sovereign identity framework.

A TON Crystal wallet also allows users to acquire tokens and transfer them to a liquidity pool, just like in MetaMask. Free TON says its industry-leading speed and scalability capabilities make it a cheap and quick solution that can be applied to the most complex DeFi mechanisms.

Learn more about Free TON

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