September final shutdown date announced for Toncoin and Token Bridge

The Open Community ($TON) has confirmed that the Toncoin and Token Bridge at bridge-v3.ton.org will stop all operations completely on September 1, 2026, drawing the curtain on an infrastructure that was behind the blockchain’s earliest days of cross-chain connectivity.

It was said within the announcement, which was printed on the $TON Standing Telegram channel, that each one beforehand submitted person transfers have been processed, and for transfers that had been executed however not but claimed, the required community charges on each the $TON and EVM chains have been lined, and people transfers have been accomplished.

In an additional concession to customers, all percentage-based switch charges have been waived for the rest of the withdrawal interval.

What do Toncoin and Token Bridge customers have to do earlier than the deadline?

$TON’s publish states that customers holding Wrapped Toncoin in an Ethereum or $BNB Sensible Chain pockets should bridge it again to the $TON community earlier than September 1, 2026.

It requested customers who had wrapped Toncoin in Ethereum or $BNB Sensible Chain wallets to bridge it again to $TON holders.

Additionally, customers who maintain j-tokens on their $TON wallets, together with jUSDT, jUSDC, jDAI, jWBTC, and another bridge-issued equivalents, should bridge these belongings again to Ethereum.

As a part of the ultimate operational steps, bridge oracles will withdraw their staked $TON in June 2026, although they’ll proceed processing transfers by way of to the ultimate shutdown date.

Why is the bridge being retired?

The shutdown has been lengthy coming, as $TON formally introduced in April 2025 that it was retiring its legacy Toncoin bridge. It said that the maturation of its personal ecosystem was the explanation for shutting down the bridge.

As of Might 10, 2025, customers might not bridge Toncoin from $TON to Ethereum or $BNB Sensible Chain; nevertheless, inbound bridging and previous switch claims have been preserved pending a future date for saying its personal sundown occasion. That announcement has now arrived.

When the bridge launched, with the Ethereum model going dwell in August 2021 and the $BNB Sensible Chain model following in October that very same 12 months, Toncoin was not but listed on centralized exchanges, and there was no native decentralized finance infrastructure on the community.

The bridge was, for a interval, the one viable route for customers wishing to commerce Toncoin, routing funds by way of platforms resembling Uniswap and PancakeSwap. Token Bridge v3, which enabled j-token transfers, was launched in April 2023.

The choice to retire the infrastructure adopted the profitable deprecation of jUSDT, the Tether-wrapped stablecoin issued by way of the bridge. The emergence of native USDt on $TON, alongside a thriving DEX ecosystem, had rendered the bridge’s unique operate redundant.

What has the bridge achieved, and what replaces it?

As of the primary time it introduced that it was retiring the bridge final 12 months, it had processed 31,893 transfers and moved greater than 101 million $TON tokens, all with no single profitable hack or exploit and with each switch accounted for and claimable.

At its peak, Wrapped Toncoin on Ethereum had gathered 35,694 holders and recorded over 460,000 transactions; on $BNB Sensible Chain, it reached 113,495 holders and greater than 2.6 million transactions.

$TON has already built-in with LayerZero, Stargate, Symbiosis, and Rhino.fi, platforms that provide native asset transfers with out the wrapped-token mode, amongst different safety and platform options.

Stargate, which is constructed on LayerZero’s omnichain messaging protocol, helps transfers throughout greater than 80 chains with unified liquidity swimming pools and near-instant settlement. The transition, $TON says, improves person security by retiring older infrastructure and encourages adoption of contemporary, scalable cross-chain instruments.

Nonetheless, LayerZero has not too long ago come below warmth for the function it performed within the Kelp DAO exploit that occurred in April. That incident led to some protocols ditching the platform in favor of rival platform Chainlink.