Next month, the TON blockchain is organizing a widespread vote in which validators will determine if the wallets of dormant miners should be suspended. These nonactive wallets are those that had taken part in Toncoin mining during its distribution phase back in June 2022 and have never made an outward transaction since then.
On February 21st, the TON Foundation will initiate a voting procedure for miners to demonstrate their activity on the TON blockchain. All wallets that have not been used since December, when the request was initially published, are up for discussion in this vote.
If a mining wallet is not in use but reactivated before the end of the voting period, it will be eligible for consideration. However, wallets that have been sent Toncoin from another source or had an outgoing transaction in any time frame will not be affected.
In July 2020, 98.55% of the total supply of Toncoin became available for mining through special ‘Giver’ smart contracts, enabling anyone to join in on the action. This distribution strategy is known as Initial Proof of Work (IPoW), combining both decentralization offered by PoW and making TON a fully functioning Proof-of-Stake blockchain simultaneously.
The last Toncoin was mined from the ‘Giver’ smart contracts in June of 2022, and about 1 billion coins were mined throughout this period. Since then, these tokens have been dormant in their wallets.
Presently, there are 195 dormant mining addresses with no outgoing transactions and a balance of at least 1 Toncoin. As of January 18th, 2023, these wallets have an aggregate total of around 1.08 billion Toncoins, making up 21.3% of all the coins. Every one of these public blockchain addresses is available to view on TON exploratory websites, such as TonTech, should this vote pass. However, each wallet would be suspended for four years and unable to carry out any kind of transaction during that period.
To ensure maximum transparency, the “suspended list” of addresses will be openly accessible on the blockchain. A network-wide vote encompassing at least 75% of validators must take place over a sequence of voting rounds to trigger a suspension.
The suspension of inactive addresses is a crucial indicator that transparency is the top priority for TON. The network hopes to identify how many Toncoins are in circulation, through this process, which could help attract more people to join the open-source project.
