Mintless Jettons on TON: A New Feature Making TON Projects Even More Attractive

Tap Games on TON (The Open Network) have become one of the most successful Web3 business models to emerge in 2024. Just take a look at some numbers:

• Hamster Kombat ($HMSTR) attracted 155 million players and earned $5.2 million solely from advertising on its YouTube channel.
• Catizen ($CATI), at the peak of its popularity, was bringing in 1.5 million new players per week, with total revenue estimated at $16 million.
• $HMSTR, $DOGS, and $CATI are already traded on Binance, ByBit, and OKX.
• The Dogs project airdrop was claimed by 17 million addresses.
• Out of the top 10 largest tokens in the TON ecosystem, half are gaming-related.

The mechanics of these games are simple: players access the game through a bot on Telegram and quickly tap on objects on the screen, trying to collect as many virtual coins as possible in hopes of receiving a future airdrop.

What’s most interesting is that these tap games, with their airdrops for tens of millions of users, have prompted TON developers to rethink their approach to creating new tokens. To prevent excessive load on the blockchain and avoid high fees for projects and users, a new technology called mintless tokens was created. This technology has already been successfully tested during the airdrop for the mega-popular game Hamster Kombat.

This is one of the few examples in Web3 where real market needs are rapidly driving the advancement of L1-chain technology. It's interesting to compare the development of mintless tokens with the Ethereum Cancun upgrade, where the entire initial concept of sharding shifted in response to the rise of rollups. But while it took a couple of years on Ethereum, on TON it only took a few months.

The specific catalyst was the Hamster Kombat airdrop for 131 million players — and to the TON team’s credit, mintless jettons were successfully tested, and the network handled the massive load without issues. This was a big improvement, as during an earlier airdrop of the $DOGS token, TON went down for several hours.

Since the start of the Notcoin ($NOT) token airdrop in May 2024, the number of monthly active addresses on the TON chain has increased more than sevenfold, from 1.6 million to 11.6 million, with the total number of wallets reaching 22.3 million. For comparison, the Tron network, which has a significantly higher TVL, has about 10.1 million active addresses per month, while Polygon has only 5.2 million.

The number of transactions on the network surged from 3.7 million to a record 17.4 million on September 28, the third day of the Hamster Kombat airdrop.

However, with the rapid growth of the TON ecosystem, new challenges have also emerged, primarily related to large airdrops for tap games. For instance, on August 27, the entire TON network froze for four hours due to overload following the launch of the $DOGS token airdrop.
The biggest challenge was yet to come: the game Hamster Kombat planned to distribute 60 billion tokens to 131 million players—7.7 times more than the Dogs airdrop.

To understand how mintless jettons help optimize mass airdrops on TON, it's essential to first look at the mechanics of regular tokens. A jetton on TON is equivalent to a standard token on Ethereum. The basic standard for developing jettons is TP-74 (similar to ERC-20).

Each token has its own master contract (also called a minter contract), written in the FunC language, which was specifically designed for TON. The master contract includes the following information:

• Current number of tokens in circulation;
• Mintable property: whether new tokens can be minted beyond the current supply. Tokens used in airdrops typically have this property, as the project needs to mint allocations for all users sequentially;
• Metadata (or a link to it): token name, ticker, description, image, decimal places, etc.

What's particularly interesting is that when a new jetton is created, not only is a master contract deployed, but also a number of jetton wallet contracts — one smart contract for each token holder.

A jetton wallet contains information about the token balance for a specific user, the user’s wallet address, the address of the main contract (master), and functions necessary for transferring and burning tokens.

It’s important to note that a jetton wallet is not the same as a regular TON wallet (also known as an account wallet). For example, if Alice sends NOT tokens to Bob, she first signs the transaction from her NOT jetton wallet. The tokens are then transferred from her main wallet to Bob's main wallet, and finally, a transfer notification is sent to Bob's NOT jetton wallet.

If Alice holds 20 different tokens (jettons) in her wallet, she actually has 20 separate jetton wallets, each of which is an independent smart contract.

In the traditional approach to conducting an airdrop, the project first creates a list of addresses for all eligible recipients. Then, the distribution process begins: the master contract generates a jetton wallet for each recipient, mints the tokens, and sends them to these jetton wallets. The users themselves don’t need to do anything.

The problem on TON is that projects also incur storage fees for data stored on smart contracts. If the balance in a contract falls below a certain minimum, the smart contract is frozen. To unfreeze it, you need access to the contract’s state at the moment of freezing, which adds further storage costs!

As a result, the majority of airdrop expenses come from paying for storage in jetton wallets and the cost of sending tokens to them.

Now imagine your airdrop involves 10 million users. How many smart contracts do you need to deploy? Correct — 1 new master contract plus 10 million wallet contracts. And you have to pay a network fee for each one. The fee itself is small, but when multiplied by millions, it amounts to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

According to some estimates, during the $NOT airdrop, creating each jetton wallet and sending tokens cost 0.01705 TON, with about half of that amount stored in the wallet just to ensure sufficient storage space. With 5 million participants, and the price of $TON at around $7 in May 2024, this comes to:

5,000,000 * 0.01705 * $7 = $596,750.

Now imagine an airdrop with 131 million participants (like Hamster Kombat). At the same TON fee (0.01705) and a TON price of $5.7, the project would need to spend:

131,000,000 * 0.01705 * $5.7 = $12,731,235.

Clearly, paying $12 million just to distribute tokens is absurd. The alternative is to pass all fees onto the users themselves. But to do this, you would need to store a list of participating addresses in the smart contract, so it can check eligibility for the airdrop. Again, if millions of users are involved, storing that much data in a smart contract is costly and inefficient, and users might not appreciate having to pay fees.

Fortunately, the TON team found a solution: mintless jettons— tokens that are only created on the blockchain when the user initiates a withdrawal from their wallet (whether through a swap, staking, etc.).

The mintless token algorithm relies on storing the list of addresses and allocations off-chain, while users prove to the smart contract that their address is on the list before claiming tokens. Step by step, the process looks like this:

• The participant list is stored off-chain, but a Merkle root (a single hash) is calculated for it — representing the complete list of addresses and individual allocations. (More details can be found here.)
• A special API service responds to a user request by providing a proof that a particular address is included in the airdrop list. The project can use an existing service (like this one) or create its own.
• A link to the API service is embedded in the token’s master contract, and the Merkle root hash is embedded in each jetton wallet.
• User Alice, through her wallet (e.g., Tonkeeper), sends a message to the API service, requesting proof that she is eligible for tokens. She needs to have TON in her balance to cover the gas fee.
• The wallet sends the proof along with a request to claim tokens to Alice’s jetton wallet.
• The jetton wallet compares the proof with the Merkle root hash. If the proof is valid, Alice’s wallet receives a notification of the token balance update, though no minting has yet occurred — the tokens still don’t exist on the blockchain.
• The tokens are only actually minted when Alice initiates a transaction to withdraw them from her wallet. This way, there is no separate transaction for claiming and generating tokens.

The term «mintless» doesn’t mean that tokens are never minted. The point is that tokens are minted not by the project, but by users — decentralized, on their own, and only when they make the first transaction with the tokens.

This procedure is highly efficient:

• Regardless of the number of participants, only a single hash (the Merkle root of the address list) needs to be generated.
• There’s no need to spend funds to store the list on-chain.
• There’s no need to pay for storage space in jetton wallets.
• There’s no need to pay for sending tokens to users.
• The project doesn’t mint all tokens at once, avoiding extreme blockchain load.
• Users also don’t mint en masse, only at the time of their first outgoing transaction (e.g., transferring tokens to an exchange).

In the TON standards list, mintless tokens are classified as TEP-177, an extension of the TP-74 standard.

Interaction with Mintless Token Airdrops

From the user’s perspective, receiving an airdrop of mintless jettons is very simple. Mintless tokens are already supported by major TON wallets like Tonkeeper and TON Wallet.

When a user connects their wallet to the airdrop bot, it checks for an allocation and displays a token balance message as if the tokens had already arrived in the wallet (even though, as we know, they haven’t actually been created yet). After this, the user can immediately make their first transaction with the tokens; at that point, the tokens are actually minted on the blockchain.

Mintless Points Test

On September 17, TownSquare Labs announced a large-scale test of mintless token technology using a specially created asset called Mintless Points. Eighteen million addresses received an airdrop of Points, which had no market value. The airdrop went smoothly, though many participants were confused to find a new, mysterious «point» in their wallet.

The next step after Points was to be a «trial by fire» — the real airdrop for Hamster Kombat.

The launch of the $HMSTR airdrop set a series of new records for TON:

• Over 1 million transactions per hour, totaling 20.4 million in 24 hours;
• 1.8 million active addresses in a single day;
• $469,800 in network fees for the day.

Despite massive media hype and a technically smooth airdrop, a significant number of Hamster Kombat airdrop participants were left disappointed, and the $HMSTR token has dropped 55% in value since the airdrop began. Why did this happen?

1. Around 60% of the 300 million players were disqualified, with the initial eligibility requirements not clearly communicated. Players believed they needed to maximize their Points Per Hour (PPH) metric to qualify, but at the last minute, it was revealed that collecting «keys» was crucial — something many players hadn’t focused on.
2. The airdrop was originally scheduled for July but was delayed until the end of September. Delays in airdrops or other major community events often lead to public frustration — projects should keep this in mind.
3. It turned out that 11% of the tokens were locked for 10 months.
4. Those who did receive the airdrop complained about small allocations, especially considering the time they had spent playing the game.
5. Large allocations were given to influencers who didn’t even play the game.
6. The listing price was unexpectedly low: each token was valued at only $0.01 when trading began. As a result, the dollar value of many participants« allocations was below the minimum threshold required for selling on exchanges—especially after the price plummeted by 40% on the first day.

From a technical perspective, the Hamster Kombat airdrop went smoothly: the TON network remained stable, and all eligible participants with compatible wallets were able to receive $HMSTR and make transactions. The airdrop cost the project significantly less than it would have with the traditional token minting model. The issues with the Hamster Kombat airdrop were due to poor organization in community management, tokenomics, and related areas.

In short, it’s been proven: mintless tokens work and can save airdrop organizers a lot of money. Now, projects on TON can confidently use airdrops as a traffic driver, without worrying that the cost of the airdrop will exceed the revenue generated from the traffic. The challenge of economic efficiency and monetization in Web3 is a pressing one, and mintless jettons could be an important step toward creating not just popular, but profitable projects.

With the advent of mintless tokens, the TON ecosystem is becoming even more attractive for the development of games and other types of projects.

It’s also worth noting that a mintless token airdrop can be combined with a ready-made solution for a game mini-app, making it even easier to launch a project.

Add to this TON's extensive partnership with Telegram and the explosive popularity of Telegram Mini Apps (TMA), and you’ll see why we recommend clients pay attention to TON.