From mini-games to DeFi, what's missing on TON?
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From mini-games to DeFi, what's missing on TON?
The TON ecosystem is growing rapidly, but its DeFi development is limited.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: LayerPixel
Translation: Baicai Blockchain
In recent months, we've witnessed explosive growth in the TON ecosystem, with games like Notcoin, Dogs, Hamster Kombat, and Catizen launching on Binance. It's rumored that this has brought millions of new KYC users to major exchanges. Whether we admit it or not, this is effectively the largest-scale blockchain application in recent years. But the question remains: what comes next?
Despite the massive user base, TON’s total value locked (TVL) remains relatively low, and we haven’t seen a surge of DeFi protocols emerge. This has sparked concerns and debates about the low on-chain user value on TON and its underdeveloped infrastructure.
However, in this article, we’d like to briefly discuss an important concept behind DeFi—“atomic swaps”—and the problems LayerPixel (PixelSwap) is addressing. On one hand, DeFi’s initial success traces back to Ethereum, which became the foundational platform for DeFi applications and smart contracts. On the other hand, the rise of asynchronous blockchains like TON brings new opportunities and challenges for DeFi, particularly in terms of composability.
1. A Brief History of DeFi
The DeFi ecosystem flourished during “DeFi Summer,” primarily centered around Ethereum. Developers leveraged the Ethereum ecosystem, using smart contracts as fundamental building blocks that could be combined like Lego pieces. This composability enabled the network effects necessary for the rapid proliferation of decentralized financial applications and services.
Ethereum’s paradigm of composability allowed various DeFi protocols to interact in innovative ways. Key financial primitives such as atomic swaps, flash loans, re-collateralization, and lending platforms demonstrated how different applications could stack together to create complex, multifunctional financial products.
As DeFi matured, the limitations of Ethereum’s synchronous model—especially regarding scalability and high transaction fees—became increasingly apparent. This fueled interest in exploring new blockchain architectures, such as asynchronous blockchains, which promised to address some of these inherent constraints.
2. Asynchronous Blockchains: A New Paradigm
Ethereum’s traditional model is synchronous, maintaining a monolithic state where each transaction is processed sequentially. In contrast, asynchronous blockchains like TON adopt an actor model approach. This shift leads to several fundamental structural differences:
Ethereum – Synchronous Blockchain (Monolithic State):
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Atomic Operations: Direct atomic transactions are possible because every transaction—even those modifying multiple smart contract states—can be treated as a single unit. The Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), for example, securely isolates all steps within a transaction, ensuring either full execution or complete failure.
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Sequential Processing: Each transaction must wait for the previous one to finish, naturally limiting throughput and scalability.
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Global State: All transactions operate on a shared global state, simplifying state management but increasing contention.
TON – Asynchronous Blockchain (Actor Model):
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Parallel Processing: Transactions can be processed concurrently across multiple actors or smart contracts, enhancing overall scalability and throughput. For instance, smart contracts on TON are independent units or actors that can update state via unidirectional messages between actors.
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Distributed State: Different actors hold isolated states and can interact with others without sharing a single global state.
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Coordination Complexity: Achieving atomic operations in this model is complex due to its distributed nature.
Although asynchronous blockchains offer significant potential for scalability (in theory), the lack of atomic swaps makes DeFi development on TON extremely difficult, regardless of the complexity of FunC/Tact languages. Consider how challenging liquidity becomes for lending protocols without atomic operations and sequential processing—let alone building intricate DeFi "Lego" structures.
At LayerPixel and PixelSwap (which uses LayerPixel’s infrastructure and operates as part of LayerPixel), we’ve proposed a novel solution to this problem, enabling atomic swaps and striving to provide safer, better solutions for exchanges and DeFi.
3. Challenges of DeFi Composability on Asynchronous Blockchains
For DeFi applications, maintaining composability on asynchronous blockchains introduces complex challenges, primarily due to the characteristics of distributed state and parallelism:
Transaction Coordination:
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Synchronization: Coordinating multiple actors to reach a consistent state at a specific point in time is highly complex. Unlike a synchronized global state that simplifies atomic operations, ensuring multiple independent actors can operate in sync presents significant obstacles.
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Consistency Models: Asynchronous systems often rely on weaker consistency models, such as eventual consistency. Ensuring all relevant actors reach a common state without divergence becomes a logistical challenge.
State Consistency:
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Concurrency Control: In a distributed environment, race conditions may occur when multiple transactions attempt to update overlapping states. This requires sophisticated mechanisms to ensure transactions are correctly serialized without creating system bottlenecks.
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State Reconciliation: Reconciling differing states between actors is necessary, and rollback mechanisms—when part of a transaction fails—must be robust enough to gracefully undo changes without causing inconsistencies.
Failure Handling:
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Atomicity: Guaranteeing that all parts of a transaction either succeed or fail completely is challenging in an environment where states are distributed and operations are non-atomic by default.
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Rollback Mechanisms: Efficiently rolling back partial state changes without leaving residual inconsistencies requires advanced techniques.
4. Pixelswap: Bridging the Composability Gap
Pixelswap’s innovative design addresses these challenges by introducing a distributed transaction framework specifically built for the TON blockchain. This architecture follows the BASE principle (BASE: an alternative to ACID) and consists of two main components: the Transaction Manager and multiple Transaction Executors.
Saga Transaction Manager
The Saga Transaction Manager orchestrates complex, multi-step transactions by applying the Saga pattern, overcoming the limitations of 2PC (Two-Phase Commit) and making it suitable for long-running distributed transactions:
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Lifecycle Management: Manages the entire transaction lifecycle, breaking it down into a series of smaller, independently executable steps, each with its own compensating action in case of failure.
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Task Distribution: Breaks down the main transaction into discrete, isolated tasks and delegates them to appropriate Transaction Executors.
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Compensating Actions: Ensures each saga has a corresponding compensating transaction that can be triggered to roll back partial changes and maintain consistency.
Transaction Executors
Transaction Executors are responsible for executing assigned tasks throughout the transaction lifecycle:
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Parallel Processing: Executors operate simultaneously, maximizing throughput and balancing system load.
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Modular Design for Functional Expansion: Each Transaction Executor is designed modularly, allowing implementation of various functions. These include different swap curves, flash loans, lending protocols, and other financial operations. This modularity ensures seamless coordination with the Saga Transaction Manager, preserving the core principle of DeFi composability.
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Eventual Consistency: Ensures local states of executors remain synchronized and reconciled with the overall distributed state of the transaction.
With these features, Pixelswap’s Transaction Executors enable robust, scalable, and asynchronous transaction execution, making it possible to build complex and composable DeFi applications on TON.
5. Conclusion
In conclusion, the future of DeFi requires adapting to the paradigm shift from synchronous to asynchronous blockchains while preserving and enhancing key principles like composability. Pixelswap emerges on the TON blockchain as a pioneering solution that elegantly combines robustness, scalability, and composability. By ensuring seamless interoperability and strong transaction management, Pixelswap paves the way for a more dynamic, scalable, and innovative DeFi ecosystem.
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