Telegram CEO Says New Toolchain Makes TON Smart Contracts 10x Faster

Pavel Durov unveiled Acton, a unified development toolchain for The Open Network (TON). The Telegram founder says it makes smart contract building 10x faster than the previous fragmented stack.

The all-in-one command-line tool guides developers through every stage of building on TON. It covers writing, testing, deployment, and on-chain verification in a single environment. Acton launches with the tagline “Built for humans. Perfect for AI.”

A Single Workflow for TON Smart Contracts

Acton is built around Tolk, TON’s newer smart contract language. Before Acton, developers had to juggle multiple different tools to build on TON. Now one tool handles the entire process, from creating a project to deploying and verifying a smart contract.

Speed is one of Acton’s biggest selling points: tests run about 50 times faster than before. The tool works with the most popular code editors and comes with built-in debugging and testing features out of the box.

Developers can also simulate real blockchain conditions locally before going live.

Acton is also built with AI in mind from the ground up. It includes dedicated guides for AI coding agents and directly supports tools like Codex and Claude.

That makes Acton more than a developer tool; it can serve as a backend for fully autonomous AI-driven development on TON.

Telegram Tightens Its Grip on TON

The release lands as Telegram has taken direct control of TON’s validator set. The company staked 2.2 million tokens on May 4 to claim the largest validator slot from the TON Foundation.

The move sits inside Durov’s “Make TON Great Again” roadmap. The program has already cut transaction fees sixfold and rolled out a faster consensus mechanism.

Toncoin (TON) Price Chart Over the Past Month. Source: CoinGecko

Catchain 2.0, a separate consensus upgrade, pushed network finality below one second in April. Toncoin (TON) rallied by more than 100% after the validator news, only to retrace. Analysts have flagged centralization risks even as protocol metrics improve.

Acton’s reception among developers will determine whether TON can challenge Solana and Ethereum in the mini-app commerce space.

Mainnet deployments in the coming weeks should provide the first measurable signal. Telegram’s nearly one-billion-user base remains the biggest distribution wedge no rival chain can match.