Pavel Durov launches Acton toolchain for TON contracts

Pavel Durov announced Acton on May 11, a unified command-line toolchain for The Open Network (TON) that guides developers through creating projects, writing contracts, running tests, deploying to mainnet and verifying on-chain within a single environment.

Acton centers on Tolk, TON’s newer smart-contract language, and replaces a set of separate utilities that developers used previously. The tool includes built-in debugging and testing, integrates with popular code editors and lets teams simulate real blockchain conditions locally before launching to mainnet. According to the release notes, project tests run about 50 times faster than with prior tooling.

The release emphasizes support for artificial intelligence workflows. Acton ships with guides for AI coding agents and provides direct integration with coding assistants such as Codex and Claude. The announcement describes the toolchain as able to function as a backend for autonomous, AI-driven development on TON.

The Acton debut follows recent protocol and network changes. Telegram staked 2.2 million tokens on May 4 and took the largest validator slot previously held by the TON Foundation. In April, a consensus upgrade called Catchain 2.0 reduced finality times to below one second. Network updates have also lowered transaction costs by roughly a factor of six. Toncoin’s price rose more than 100% after the validator change and later retraced.

Developers are expected to begin mainnet deployments using Acton in the coming weeks; those deployments will provide measurable signals of adoption. Telegram’s near one-billion-user platform remains a distribution advantage for TON.

In his May 11 announcement, Durov wrote: “Built for humans. Perfect for AI.” He added, “Developing for TON just became 10x faster. Start building!”