Originally published at https://mrnasdog.com/research/ton/inflation

TON Inflation Analysis · August 2026 · Supply growing, projected to keep growing

TON, the coin of The Open Network, is uncapped, and in April 2026 the network made itself almost six times more inflationary without changing a single tokenomics parameter. The Catchain 2.0 upgrade cut block time from about 2.4 seconds to 0.4 while leaving the per-block minting reward at 1.7 TON on the masterchain and 1 TON on the basechain, so block emission over the last 90 days came to 51.6M TON. Add 15.9M TON of realised Believers Fund unlocks, subtract a fee burn of only 0.07M TON, and the MrNasdog Pressure Framework reads +2.45% net supply growth against a circulating base of 2.75B TON. Our supply monitor reads +2.40% — a gap of just 0.05 percentage points, so the two readings now agree.

The verdict, in one paragraph

Over the 90 days to Aug 9 2026, the framework reads TON at +2.45% net supply growth — about 67.5M TON of new and unlocked supply against 0.07M TON removed — and projects the same +2.45% for the next 90 days, because the mechanism is a constant. Our supply monitor reads the same window at +2.40%, a gap of only 0.05 percentage points, so no monitor-gap flag is raised. That is a notable change from the previous build, when the monitor read +8.75% and the framework flagged a 6.31 point conflict: the gap came from a one-off reclassification of the tradable float — roughly 210M TON stepping into the circulating figure around Apr 30 2026 to May 5 2026, the days Telegram staked in as a validator and moved to replace the TON Foundation as the network's driving force. That step has now aged out of the trailing 90-day window, the monitor has settled back to real issuance, and the two readings reconcile. TON is structurally inflationary by block subsidy: an uncapped chain that mints per block and got much faster.

Sell pressure: where new TON comes from

Sell #1, protocol inflation, is almost the whole story at 51.6M TON over 90 days. The Open Network has no maximum supply and no proof-of-work subsidy left — the original giver contracts mined out in 2022 — so every new TON in existence today is a block creation fee minted to validators. That fee lives in chain config parameter 14, read live for this build: 1.7 TON per masterchain block and 1 TON per basechain block. Catchain 2.0 activated on Apr 9 2026 and took block time from about 2.36 seconds to 0.4 seconds. The reward per block was not reduced to compensate, so emission scaled with the block rate. Counting blocks across the window directly — the masterchain produced 19.0M blocks and the basechain roughly 19.3M — puts issuance at about 32.3M TON plus 19.3M TON. Annualised, that is a jump in TON's inflation from around 0.6% to roughly 3.6%. A validator vote in June 2026 proposed cutting the masterchain fee from 1.7 to 0.35 TON, but config parameter 14 still reads 1.7 today, so the elevated rate carries into the forward view unchanged.

Sell #2, vesting unlocks, contributes 15.9M TON — far less than the headline calendar suggests. The TON Believers Fund is an escrow that early holders voluntarily locked for two years from October 2023, releasing monthly across 36 installments thereafter. The published entitlement is about 36.6M TON per month, which would imply roughly 110M TON over this window. The escrow contract's own balance says otherwise: it stands at 1,264.6M TON on Aug 9 2026, and a direct walk of its outgoing transactions across the window shows only about 15.9M TON actually left, because vested-but-unclaimed coins simply stay inside the lock, where they are not tradable. What the framework counts is the coins that actually left — not the gross entitlement — following the rule that a readable escrow is measured by realised outflow, not by calendar.

Sell #3, foundation and unscheduled unlocks, is 0. No identified team-controlled wallet was observed releasing TON into the market during the window, so the row carries no value even though the capacity is large. Sell #4, long-term locked or bankruptcy, is also 0. TON has no bankruptcy estate — the 2020 SEC settlement over the original Gram sale returned investor money in cash and left no token estate — and the one large frozen block on this chain is a governance freeze rather than a court process, with no thaw inside the window.

Buy pressure: where new TON goes

Buy #2, the protocol fee burn, is the only live buy-side mechanism on The Open Network, and it removes just 0.07M TON over 90 days. Half of every transaction fee is destroyed rather than paid to the validator, which sounds meaningful until it meets the arithmetic. The same Catchain 2.0 upgrade that multiplied issuance also cut transaction fees by about six times on May 1 2026 — a standard transaction now costs roughly 0.00039 TON — so the burn shrank at precisely the moment the mint grew. It now offsets around a tenth of one percent of new supply: a real mechanism, an immaterial number, and one Telegram has said it wants to push toward feeless transactions entirely.

The other three buy rows are structurally empty. Buy #1, programmatic buyback, is 0: TON runs no buyback contract and no treasury programme that purchases TON on the open market. Buy #3, foundation buy, is 0: neither the TON Foundation nor Telegram has disclosed discretionary open-market accumulation, and the row stays monitored. Buy #4, new long-term lock, is 0: staking on TON does not remove coins from supply, because validator stake is returned each election round and continues to count as circulating. Telegram's own validator stake is liquid between rounds and is not a lockup.

Foundation and overhang

A large share of the 5.23B total supply sits outside the tradable float, and it resolves into three identified blocks. The largest is the TON Believers Fund escrow at 1,264.6M TON, on a published monthly calendar; its realised outflow is what row 2 of the sell ledger measures, and it is read from the contract on every rebuild. The second is the frozen early-miner overhang: 1,081,389,417 TON held across 171 dormant genesis wallets that mined directly from the initial proof-of-work mechanism and never transacted, frozen by a validator vote and locked until Feb 21 2027 — outside this window, but the single largest scheduled event on TON's horizon. The third is the TON Foundation operational treasury, which shows no cadence of market selling.

All three are tracked by descriptor and address, and the escrow and foundation wallets are read on-chain at each rebuild. If any of these balances falls between refreshes, the outflow enters Sell #3 at the next refresh rather than being smoothed into a forecast.

How TON compares to other uncapped layer-1 chains

TON belongs to the uncapped continuous-emission class of layer-1 chains, alongside networks like Solana and Cardano — but its emission formula is unusual, and that unusualness is the whole reason the number moved. Most proof-of-stake chains set issuance as a percentage of supply per year: a validator reward curve indifferent to how fast blocks are produced. TON instead mints a fixed quantity per block. Under that design, throughput and monetary policy are the same lever. Catchain 2.0 was engineered as a performance upgrade, and it delivered — sub-second finality, roughly ten times the throughput — but because the per-block reward was a constant rather than a rate, a 5.8× increase in block production became a 5.8× increase in issuance. A chain like Cardano, releasing a fixed percentage of a declining reserve each epoch, cannot have that accident.

Against hard-capped, halving-model chains the contrast is sharper still. Bitcoin's issuance falls on a schedule written into the protocol and cannot rise; TON's rose by governance inaction. Against fee-burn chains, TON's burn is real but structurally weak: Ethereum's base-fee burn can exceed issuance in busy periods because the burn scales with demand, whereas TON burns half of a fee base the network deliberately cut by six times. The nearest structural analogue is an uncapped chain whose emission is set by a governable constant — which makes the pending validator vote on the block reward the single most important variable on this page. If the masterchain fee drops from 1.7 to 0.35 TON, Sell #1 falls sharply and TON's reading roughly halves. Until config parameter 14 changes on-chain, the framework reads what the chain actually pays.

What to watch in the next 90 days

First, chain config parameter 14. The validator vote to cut the masterchain block fee from 1.7 to 0.35 TON was raised in June 2026, but the parameter still reads 1.7; the day it changes, roughly half of TON's sell pressure disappears. Second, the Believers Fund monthly draws — the escrow releases monthly, and the framework counts the realised outflow each rebuild, so a jump in claim rate would push Sell #2 materially higher without any change in the calendar. Third, the Feb 21 2027 thaw of 1,081,389,417 frozen early-miner TON: outside this window, but a large expansion of the tradable float when it lands, and the governance discussion around it will start well before the date. Fourth, whether Telegram's deepening operational role, following the Gram rename on Jun 15 2026, brings any further reclassification of what counts as circulating — the exact effect that opened, and has now closed, this asset's monitor gap. Fifth, the push toward feeless transactions, which would shrink the fee burn further toward zero.

Summary

The MrNasdog Pressure Framework reads TON at +2.45% net supply growth over the last 90 days and the same +2.45% projected for the next 90 — supply growing, and projected to keep growing — now confirmed by a supply monitor reading +2.40% just 0.05 points away. The structural mechanism is a fixed per-block minting reward on an uncapped chain: when Catchain 2.0 cut block time to 0.4 seconds in April 2026 without cutting the 1.7 TON masterchain reward, issuance rose almost six-fold to 51.6M TON per 90 days, against a fee burn of 0.07M and no buyback at all. The key risk is that this is governance-dependent rather than protocol-locked in either direction: a pending validator vote could halve issuance, while the 1.08B TON of frozen early-miner supply thawing on Feb 21 2027 could expand the float sharply. There is no ceiling to fall back on — TON has no maximum supply, so nothing caps this except a decision.

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MrNasdog Pressure Framework analysis of TON, Metric 1 — Inflation. Data + explanation only. Not financial advice. Updated Aug 9 2026.