NOT Pixels

The TON blockchain is like a multi-core processor.

Imagine running a single-threaded program on a multi-core processor. It will certainly run, but it will be less efficient because only one core is utilized instead of all of them.

The situation is similar with sending tokens and creating smart contracts in TON.

Yesterday at the NOT Pixels minting event, the TokenTable service initially used a “single-threaded” method to send tokens to 500,000 users. While this had little to no impact on the blockchain itself and had a negligible impact on shardchain, a portion of NOT Pixels users were left unsatisfied - some of them received their tokens after an hour's wait. Messages on TokenTable contracts were executed sequentially, not in parallel.

TokenTable is a good tool for sending tokens in TON, and has previously successfully minted for games with much larger audiences using a “multi-threaded” sharded approach.

We recommend that developers working with large audiences consider sharding to provide a better UX for your services.

However, we also ask users to be understanding: service developers on TON are pioneering the use of asynchronous technologies on the blockchain. Many of the new approaches and paradigms pioneered in TON are just beginning to be actively adopted.

In TON Core, we continue to work on improving our “processor” so that even suboptimally written smart contracts can run at maximum speed.