The Toncoin (TON) blockchain has experienced a significant slowdown in transaction processing over the past two days due to an unexpected increase in user transactions.
The network saw more than 3 million new transactions, causing severe congestion and verification delays.
The congestion was triggered by TON20 inscriptions, which, similar to BRC20, led to more than 2 million transactions in half an hour. This resulted in a 61-fold increase in network usage.
Inscriptions are known as tagged satoshis on the Bitcoin network and can be described as memecoins of the BTC network.
Despite the slowdown, no smart contracts or user assets are at risk and all messages sent will eventually be processed, according to the official blog post.
The architecture of the TON blockchain allows it to handle a much larger payload quickly, according to the official blog post published by TON developers. However, some of the mainnet's validator nodes were running on weak hardware, which limited their bandwidth. These validators rented hardware for low load and no provision was made for load increase. This blockage became a problem when the load increased 50-100 times within 30 minutes.
Developers reported that despite network slowness due to congestion, the network is still operational.
*This is not investment advice.