TON Labs has raised $6 million in support of the Free TON blockchain.

The investment round, led by Runa Capital and RTP Global, will be used to finance the company’s open blockchain network.

TON Labs, the Free TON blockchain’s growth arm, has secured $6 million in a funding round led by venture capital company Runa Capital.

The funds will be used to create a modern product ecosystem for the Free TON blockchain, which the firm claims is the quickest decentralised protocol thanks to its innovative hierarchical sharding mechanisms.

Dmitry Chikhachev, a general partner at Runa Capital, stated that TON Labs is his firm’s first direct investment in a blockchain venture.

“As a deep tech and software investor, we appreciate the technical challenges solved by the company and see a strong potential in the high-performance decentralised computing platform FreeTON,” he said, adding:

“The team, their sophisticated approach and the open-source TON project itself radically differ from other ventures in the blockchain space, and Runa is thrilled to support such a unique project.”

In addition to Runa Capital, RTP Global, an early-stage technology investor, committed to the funding round. “We think TON Labs will eventually take blockchain from the niche and geeky space it is today to a mainstream technology that closely complements the existing IT landscape,” said RTP executive Stepan Ivanov.

After achieving “sufficient decentralisation,” or more than 400 validators and decentralised autonomous organisations, Free TON was granted mainnet status in December 2020. The project was initially launched in May 2020 as a supplier of infrastructure solutions for the Telegram Open Network. When a New York federal court issued an injunction against the Telegram team, blocking further network growth, Free TON originated as an independent project that completed the original Telegram code and developed the TON Operating System.

In February, Free TON merged with Dune Network, claiming that the transition would promote the broader use of blockchain technologies and shared governance. Following the full allocation of TON Crystals (TON) to the Dune Network, the merger is scheduled to be completed later this year.

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