Pavel Durov launches Acton to speed TON smart contracts
Telegram founder Pavel Durov unveiled Acton, a unified CLI toolchain for The Open Network that he says makes smart contract development 10x faster across coding, testing, deployment and verification.
Pavel Durov introduced Acton on May 11, presenting it as a single command-line toolchain for developing smart contracts on The Open Network (TON). The announcement included the tagline “Built for humans. Perfect for AI.” Durov wrote that Acton “makes smart contract building 10x faster than the previous fragmented stack.”
Acton is built around Tolk, TON’s newer smart contract language. The tool replaces a set of separate developer utilities with one end-to-end workflow that covers project creation, coding, debugging, testing, deployment and on-chain verification. The release states Acton integrates with popular code editors and can simulate real blockchain conditions locally before contracts go live. Developers will run local tests substantially faster; the release reports tests running about 50 times faster than prior tooling for local testing.
The tool includes documentation and guides for AI coding agents and direct support for models such as Codex and Claude. The release describes these features as enabling Acton to act as a backend for more autonomous, AI-driven development workflows on TON.
Acton follows recent protocol and network changes for TON. On May 4, Telegram staked 2.2 million tokens to secure the largest validator slot from the TON Foundation under the “Make TON Great Again” roadmap. That change coincided with a sixfold reduction in transaction fees. A separate upgrade, Catchain 2.0, reduced network finality to below one second in April.
Market response to Telegram’s increased on-chain activity has been volatile. Toncoin rose more than 100% after the validator stake announcement and later retraced. Some analysts have raised concerns about increased centralization even as protocol performance metrics improved.
Telegram’s user base, approaching one billion accounts, is cited as a potential distribution channel for TON apps. Mainnet deployments of Acton planned in the coming weeks will provide the first observable data on developer adoption and whether projects use the toolchain to deploy on TON.
