TON Core Launches Acton: A New Smart Contract Development Tool for the Open Network

TON Core has officially launched Acton, a new smart contract development framework designed to simplify and accelerate dApp development across The Open Network ecosystem. The launch marks TON’s most significant developer tooling play to date, positioning the blockchain to compete for developer mindshare against established ecosystems like Solana and Ethereum.

What Is Acton?

Acton is a developer-focused framework that streamlines writing, testing, and deploying smart contracts on TON. While full technical specifications are still emerging, early signals suggest the framework abstracts away much of the boilerplate that has historically made TON development more challenging compared to EVM-compatible chains.

The announcement immediately attracted attention across cryptocurrency and developer communities. Blockchain infrastructure and developer tools remain critical components driving Web3 adoption, and Acton positions TON to compete more directly with established smart contract ecosystems.

Why It Matters For Developers

Developer experience has become the primary battleground for Layer 1 blockchains. The easier it is to build on a chain, the more applications — and users — it attracts. TON has been growing steadily through infrastructure development, decentralized applications, and payments focused tools. Acton is the latest piece of that strategy.

TON’s unique architecture — based on asynchronous smart contracts and sharding — has historically required specialized knowledge. Acton aims to reduce that friction, potentially opening the ecosystem to a broader developer base familiar with more traditional programming paradigms. The new tool allows blockchain latency to be measured in milliseconds rather than seconds, moving close to real world expectations from web3 and the biggest upgrade to the network in recent years.

The Developer Tools Arms Race

Acton joins a growing ecosystem of chain-specific development frameworks:

• Foundry for Ethereum (the current gold standard for EVM development)
• Anchor for Solana (SEAL-approved framework with built-in security patterns)
• Hardhat v3 for multi-chain EVM development
• Acton for TON (the newest entrant)

Each framework reflects its chain’s philosophy. Foundry emphasizes speed and flexibility. Anchor enforces Solana’s security model by default. Acton’s design choices will tell us a lot about TON’s developer strategy going forward.

What’s Next

As more details emerge about Acton’s feature set — including debugging capabilities, testing frameworks, deployment workflows, and integration with existing TON infrastructure — it will be worth comparing against other L1 frameworks. For now, the launch is a clear signal: TON is investing seriously in developer infrastructure, and that’s a bet worth watching. Toncenter API has released a new accelerated Streaming API V2 for all users on the main and test networks. The first products MyTonWallet and tonscan.org — have already switched to Streaming API V2 on the main and test networks.

Developers interested in building on TON should monitor the Acton documentation and early community feedback. First impressions matter in developer tools, and Acton’s initial reception will shape TON’s developer growth trajectory for the rest of 2026.