UTONIC Protocol, the first restaking platform built on The Open Network, today announces its latest alliance with notable AVS (Actively Validated Services) providers from the TON and Telegram ecosystem, including

Being the first restaking protocol for TON, UTONIC aims to extend TON Network’s security to thousands of Telegram applications and build the revenue-sharing layer for one billion users.

Background

On Oct 12, 2024, UTONIC team submitted a proposal to TONResearch, seeking to enhance the security of the growing number of applications in Telegram, increasing the value and yield of TON assets, and encouraging more TON holders to participate in staking.

The original proposal can be found at https://tonresear.ch/t/introducing-ton-restaking-the-utonic-approach/38260

How does UTONIC and Restaking AVS work?

By repurposing staked assets, users can secure Actively Validated Services (AVS) within the UTONIC network while consenting to grant additional enforcement rights over their staked assets. This opt-in feature introduces supplementary slashing conditions tailored to the specific needs of validated services, such as wallets, bridges, or oracles. These slashing conditions enforce participant integrity, ensuring the security of applications leveraging UTONIC is maintained.

UTONIC functions as a marketplace where developers can incentivize operators to allocate their restaked TON for securing their services. This represents a significant improvement over the traditional approach, where applications often need to issue highly inflationary tokens as rewards for validators and build a new trust network from the ground up. With UTONIC, developers can leverage on the security provided by restaked TON assets, drastically reducing the financial and time investment required compared to establishing a new trust network from scratch.

Bringing Real Yield and Use Cases to the TON Ecosystem

Through UTONIC’s restaking approach, the security of dApps and protocols on TON and Telegram can be strengthened. Companies and projects are incentivized to restake TON, further maximizing the security and revenue stream for their protocols.

Unlike many popular Telegram mini-apps that are built on Telegram but have not interacted with the TON blockchain, UTONIC uplifts the yield opportunity for applications built on TON, encouraging innovations and foraging use cases for the TON blockchain. Although the TON and Telegram ecosystem has a large user base of more than 1 billion users, the majority of these users are smaller-scale retail participants.To attract larger-scale professional and institutional DeFi participants, the TON ecosystem needs to meet a stricter security and decentralization standard. UTONIC addresses this gap by offering AVS, ensuring the high security standards required for DeFi growth. The UTONIC restaking approach is a significant move for Telegram Web2 applications, as most of these scenarios are currently centralized and lack trustworthy operators.

Applications such as sidechains, data availability layers, keeper networks, oracle networks, bridges, threshold cryptography schemes, trusted execution environments, etc, who leverage on TON’s strong user base of 1 billion users, are particularly sensitive to security risks. By utilizing AVS provided by UTONIC, these applications can operate in a secure environment, which is essential for gaining trust from builders and incentivizes their integration into the TON ecosystem.

An Innovative Attempt on Incentive Distribution

Being veterans in the DeFi industry, UTONIC proposes an innovative approach in distributing incentives, to foster a healthy equilibrium between the protocol, AVS, and restakers.

Instead of allocating incentives to “farm & sell” type of users, mostly whales, which might create a huge sell pressure, UTONIC will integrate veTokenomic model, inspired by Curve Finance, to direct more incentives towards long-term supporters and partners with selected AVS providers,  to bring real yields to TON holders.

Lemon, Co-founder of UTONIC Protocol: "UTONIC not only enhances application security but also drives sustainable growth in the TON ecosystem. By establishing an incentive structure that benefits all builders and users, we ensure a system that encourages long-term participation and creates more value for the whole TON ecosystem."