Dr. Doge 🐶 Field Notes from 2013

📢 TON Network Update July 13: What You Need to Know

A mandatory software update is scheduled for Monday, July 13 at 10:00 UTC for both validators and full node operators.

What is this about?

This is the next step of TON's "Sub-Second" upgrade program the ongoing rollout of Catchain 2.0, the new consensus protocol designed to cut block finality from ~2.5 seconds down to 200–400 milliseconds.

Based on the current development branch, this release focuses on:

⚡️ A faster, more resilient broadcast layer a new protocol for how nodes share blocks and data across the network, with added protection against misbehaving peers

🔄 Extending the new consensus to all full nodes not just validators, which is why this update is mandatory for everyone running a node

🛠 Plus bandwidth optimizations and stability fixes

On July 15, the matching network configuration changes are expected to go to a validator vote the usual two-step process: everyone updates first, then the new features are switched on.

What does this mean for you?

Regular users: nothing to do. Wallets, funds, and dApps are not affected you'll just get a faster network.

Node/validator operators: schedule your update for July 13, 10:00 UTC. Unpatched nodes may lose sync once the new configuration activates.

🐤 How TON is getting ready for heavier loads

⚫️ In just an hour, the network will begin voting on a new set of validator upgrades. Ahead of the vote, Dr. Awesome Doge published a detailed breakdown of what is changing — so we’ll recap the key points.

⚫️ If April’s upgrade was about making transactions faster, June’s is about something less exciting but no less important: keeping the network stable under heavy load.

⚫️ TON plans to create a dedicated lane for validators to exchange block drafts. Right now, that traffic shares the same route as regular transactions. During sharp spikes in activity, this can hurt network performance — as already happened during the Hamster Kombat and DOGS listings.

⚫️ The same vote also includes other items: staking changes for validators and the gradual shutdown of TON Bridge, which we recently covered separately. Voting progress can be tracked here, and the original code for the changes is available on GitHub.

@thedailyton

In China, there is a significant date referred to as "May 35th." Typically, on this day or the two days surrounding it, VPNs experience large-scale disconnections and loss of signal.

Are you all prepared to assess whether your VPN is sufficiently stable to remain functional during this period? 📡

You already let AI summarize your docs and your unread chats. The catch: to pull that off, your private files get uploaded to some company's AI, which can read them, train on them, and profile you.

At Blockchain Life in Dubai, Durov told the story of how 🤖 COCOON was born to break that trade. A decentralized network on TON where GPU owners rent out compute for TON, and your data gets processed inside a sealed box even the machine's owner can't open. You get the AI, you keep the privacy.

I went back through the launch talk, what he announced and why 👇

🔗 Telegraph link

After the Titanic hit the iceberg, the passengers stayed aboard for almost two hours. They were sure it couldn't sink. The lifeboats rowed away half empty.

Durov opened his Oslo Freedom Forum talk with that image, then said the ship of personal freedom has already hit the iceberg, and most of us haven't noticed we're sinking.

He laid out the tricks moving from East to West: thousands arrested in the UK over social posts, "protect the children" used as cover for ID checks and encryption backdoors, and the one that chilled me most, AI tearing the ceiling off surveillance. The KGB had a human limit. It needed officers and hours. AI has neither.

I wrote up the whole speech, the sharpest examples, and where I'd push back 👇

🔗 Telegraph link

🔔Your 10 TON will soon show as 10 GRAM. The most important line first: you don't need to do anything.

Telegram is renaming TON's token from Toncoin to Gram, ticker TON to GRAM. It's only a name change. The chain stays TON, and your balance, addresses, and contracts don't move. No swap, no migration, no claim. Anything telling you to "swap TON for GRAM" or "claim your GRAM" is a scam.

But Gram is no ordinary name. It's the exact one the SEC came after back in the 2018 era, the name Telegram was forced to drop. Bringing it back six years later, by its own hand, is the real signal: Telegram has stepped to the front.

The backstory, the scams to watch, and my take, all in one piece 👇

🔗 Telegraph link

🪙Your TON has been jobless since the day you bought it.

Time to send it to work:

1. Drop your TON into KTON (we file the paperwork)
2. You get 💱 KTON back as proof your TON is now gainfully employed
3. KTON deploys your TON to PoS validators across the TON network
4. You stay on the couch. The paycheck arrives anyway.

Currently around 16% APY. Fluctuates like any honest job market.
Your idle TON earns 0% APY. Indefinitely. Even your houseplants are more ambitious. At least they grow.

✅ Your job: deposit the TON
❌ Everything after that: above your pay grade

👉 app.kton.io

🤑 April's "TON got faster" made the headlines. But fast was never the finish line.

The real test is the moment a project blows up and everyone rushes in at the same second, whether the chain holds up in the jam.

This week TON did two things: on June 1 every validator installed new software, and on June 3 they vote on-chain on whether to switch on the new abilities inside it. None of it is a slogan, but it's what decides whether last month's speed survives real
traffic.

I wrote up the impact, the optimizations, and the improvements, with a config-and-source map at the end for anyone who wants to go deeper 👇

🔗 Telegraph link

On April 1st, a huge number of people in Russia found Telegram had just stopped connecting. Proxies died one by one. Normal websites loaded fine.

Most assumed their IP got blocked again, switched lines, and got nowhere.

Because this time the block wasn't aimed at your IP. It was aimed at your disguise. Telegram's answer was to change into a whole new outfit overnight, one that looks like the latest browser, and to let a blocked proxy switch itself to the next live one.

But this costume war is still going, right into the end of this month.

I wrote the whole thing up. Code, not headlines 👇

🔗 Telegraph link

Everyone wants an AI agent that can act for them. Nobody wants it draining their wallet.

🏴 TON's fix: don't give the AI your wallet, give it a spare card. You keep the master key, the AI gets one you can freeze or cut anytime, and it can never touch your principal.

What it does, and where I'd still be careful

→ Read on Telegraph 📰

Anthropic shipped Claude Opus 4.8 yesterday. 41 days after 4.7. That is the pace of someone who knows the competition is about to drop something big.

What actually changed:

- Agentic coding: 64.3% → 69.2%
- 4x less likely to let bugs pass without flagging them
- Fast mode roughly 2.5x quicker
- The model is now more willing to say "I am not sure"

They are calling it "the most honest model yet." The real story is that they trained it to admit uncertainty. This is the opposite of how every other AI provider has trained for the last five years. Honesty as a competitive moat.

Side detail buried in the launch: in a simulated town benchmark, Claude's agents committed less crime than any other model.

I am still deciding whether that is funny or terrifying.

Mythos class teased for the coming weeks. 🐶

The Cryptocurrency That Remains Unused 📉

Signal incorporated a cryptocurrency for five years, a fact likely unknown to most users. In April 2021, Signal introduced "Signal Payments," utilizing a currency known as MobileCoin. At the time, this integration was hailed as a breakthrough for the platform, which boasted 85 million monthly active users. However, adoption was virtually non-existent.

The MobileCoin blockchain has not received a code update since 2026. The project rebranded to Sentz in 2023. The founder of Signal resigned in 2022. Jack Dorsey advocated for Signal to discontinue the integration last year. The asset price peaked at $73 in 2021 and currently trades at $0.16. 💸

The technology itself was not the primary issue. Signal maintained MobileCoin at arm's length; the feature was opt-in and buried within settings, functioning as a peripheral payment option rather than a core infrastructure component.

Conversely, Pavel Durov is pursuing the opposite strategy this week. A mandatory TON mainnet update is scheduled for Monday. This update involves the deletion of 12,000 lines of obsolete consensus code. New cryptographic protocols now enable TON contracts to verify Ethereum signatures directly, establishing Telegram as the largest validator on its own network. 🔗

The distinction between these two narratives lies not in the technology, but in commitment. When a messaging platform adopts cryptocurrency merely as a feature, the asset fails. When a platform adopts cryptocurrency as its core, the asset thrives.

The results of these five-year trajectories are now evident.

→ Read on Telegraph 📰

Taipei weather report:

Real temperature: 37°C. Apparent: 42°C. Body's interpretation: 「WHY」.

UV index reaches 10 next Wednesday. 10 was meant to be the cap. Climate change is now a versioning problem.
You step outside. Sweating begins before you have decided to move. The body settles the bill before the brain reads the invoice.

AC has been promoted from luxury to critical dependency. The heat does not negotiate. 🐶