The First TON Givers: How the Initial Supply Was Distributed
TON’s initial supply was neither sold nor distributed manually. It was issued through 20 smart-contract givers that operated automatically from July 2020. We pulled all their transfers into our database and calculated how much TON was distributed, who received it, and what happened to those wallets afterward.
In brief
- 20 givers distributed 4 927 397 915,77 TON to 3 279 wallets
- That amounted to 1 321 993 individual transfers
- The distribution ran from 2 July 2020 to 18 December 2022
- 97,93 % of the total amount was distributed in a single year, 2020
- The top 100 recipients received 88,40 % of the distribution
Two TON Foundation contracts operated separately from these twenty. We cover them at the end.
Two types of givers
The givers fall into two groups of exactly ten contracts, and they behave very differently.
Large givers — ten contracts, each with a balance of approximately 480 million TON. The average transfer was 99 972,92 TON. These were large payouts distributed in occasional batches: 48 013 transfers to 251 wallets in total.
PoW givers — also ten contracts, but these paid rewards for solving proof-of-work tasks. The average transfer was exactly 100 TON per block, with approximately 12,74 million TON per contract. That explains the volume: 1 273 980 transfers to 3 156 wallets.
The total amounts differ by a factor of 38, while the number of recipients shows the opposite pattern:
A total of 128 wallets received funds from both large and PoW givers, which is why 251 + 3 156 is greater than the final total of 3 279 unique addresses.
Large givers: 480 million each
The ten contracts distributed almost identical amounts—the difference between the first and last was less than 5 TON out of 480 million. This was consistent mechanics, not an individual decision.
The number of recipients for each contract also stayed within a narrow range—from 180 to 195 wallets. In other words, the same group of addresses collected payouts from all ten contracts.
PoW givers: ten identical contracts
The pattern was exactly the same here. All ten distributed around 12,74 million TON, with a difference of 4 100 TON between the first and last, or 0,03 %.
Each contract issued about 127 400 rewards of 100 TON. Each had more than a thousand recipients—from 1 286 to 1 374 wallets—so the PoW distribution was an order of magnitude broader than the large payouts.
All ten started between 2–6 July 2020 and finished in June 2022, within two weeks of one another. None stands out in either amount or timing.
Almost everything ended in 2020
The distribution did not stretch over multiple years. During their first six months of operation, the givers distributed 4,83 billion TON—97,93 % of the final total. Everything afterward consisted of 100 TON PoW rewards.
Interestingly, the number of recipients peaked in 2021—2 880 wallets versus 277 in 2020. In other words, large amounts went to a small group immediately, while the mass PoW distribution in smaller amounts unfolded a year later.
The distribution was extremely concentrated
3 279 wallets sounds like broad distribution. In reality, almost everything is concentrated among the top 100.
The remaining 2 779 addresses received less than one-third of a percent combined. The largest recipient received 112 400 300 TON in 3 125 transfers.
The ten largest recipients. Six of them do not yet have a label in our database, so shortened addresses are shown for them:
| # | Wallet | Transfers | Received, TON | Share |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Frozen early miner | 3 125 | 112 400 300 | 2,28 % |
| 2 | Early miner #2 | 2 445 | 108 835 800 | 2,21 % |
| 3 | Early miner #1 | 2 384 | 99 838 700 | 2,03 % |
| 4 | -1:3d44…3a56 |
1 927 | 94 198 600 | 1,91 % |
| 5 | -1:5eea…23e7 |
1 986 | 90 408 300 | 1,83 % |
| 6 | -1:de5d…871d |
1 939 | 89 304 700 | 1,81 % |
| 7 | Frozen early miner | 1 985 | 87 810 800 | 1,78 % |
| 8 | -1:8a26…66a1 |
1 889 | 87 801 200 | 1,78 % |
| 9 | -1:c363…95c5 |
2 020 | 60 741 400 | 1,23 % |
| 10 | -1:8ebf…6b0a |
2 024 | 59 642 900 | 1,21 % |
Each of these ten recipients received payouts from all twenty contracts, taking 18,08 % of the distribution between them.
What happened to these wallets
The giver recipients are the roots of early-mining clusters in our system. We followed outgoing transfers from each recipient and identified 1 896 active clusters containing 5 758 wallets: 3 275 were the giver recipients themselves, while another 2 483 were addresses one hop away.
Nine out of ten addresses that received the initial supply have done nothing since. 136 wallets are marked as frozen, and only 62 are participating in the ecosystem today.
An important caveat: the status was calculated for 3 275 first-level wallets. The other 2 483 second-level addresses have not yet been labeled; they are recorded as unknown in the data and are not included in the chart above.
How wallets entered a cluster:
The third wave: two foundation contracts
In addition to the twenty givers, the data contains two more contracts that we mark with the separate foundation_giver tag. They operated later and according to a different logic: 470 108 148,79 TON to 159 wallets in 376 transfers, from 1 April 2021 to 8 January 2025.
The contracts differed noticeably in style. The old one operated for a long time and distributed funds broadly: 344 transfers to 147 wallets, with an average transfer of 238 076 TON. The new one used occasional large transactions: just 32 transfers to 13 wallets, with an average size of 12 131 562 TON, from September 2023 to October 2024.
This wave is not included in the figure for the twenty givers. Counting all 22 contracts together gives 5 397 506 064,56 TON across 3 432 wallets.
Sources and methodology
All figures in this article are aggregates from our database, with no external sources.
Distribution data — the wallet_action table, containing decoded actions for each wallet. We use outgoing transfers (direction = OUTGOING, type = TON_TRANSFER, status = SUCCESS) from the addresses of the twenty givers. Amounts are stored in nanotons and converted to TON by dividing by 10⁹. In 2020, the coin was called GRAM—that was the same unit.
We intentionally do not use the derived wallet_giver_distribution table here: at the time of calculation, it was missing events from two PoW contracts and understated their distribution by more than three times. wallet_action is the complete source.
Calculation period. For the twenty givers, we count only 2020–2022. After that, they made isolated dust transfers—5 transactions totaling 0,09 TON during 2023–2025. They do not affect the final figures, but they distort the yearly chart and the distribution end date, so they were excluded. The foundation wave is counted in full: its 2023–2025 transfers amount to hundreds of millions of TON, not dust.
We also excluded 56 contract service calls (SMART_CONTRACT_EXEC) totaling 8 850 TON, as these were not payouts to recipients.
Statuses and clusters — wallet_early_miner_cluster and wallet_early_miner_cluster_member: clusters are built by our Early Miner Cluster pipeline using a breadth-first traversal from each giver recipient; wallet status (dormant, frozen, ecosystem_active) is assigned during the outcome recalculation step. Clusters were built for recipients of all 22 contracts and based on the previous rebuild, so the 3 275 root wallets are not the same as the 3 279 recipients of the twenty givers.
Giver pages — each of the twenty contracts is listed in the wallet directory:
Large givers: 1 · 2 · 3 · 4 · 5 · 6 · 7 · 8 · 9 · 10
PoW givers: 1 · 2 · 3 · 4 · 5 · 6 · 7 · 8 · 9 · 10
Data boundaries. The figures reflect what had been synchronized to our database at the time of calculation, not the entire blockchain. Wallet statuses for second-level cluster addresses have not yet been labeled. The distribution by giver type (large_giver / pow_giver) is our classification based on contract behavior, not a label from the network.