Toncoin (TON) Network Dodges Critical Smart Contract Vulnerability Before Major Upgrade

The TON blockchain narrowly avoided a potential network crash after cybersecurity firm TonBit detected a critical flaw in the TON VIRTUAL Machine. The vulnerability, located in the INMSGPARSE instruction, involved a null-pointer dereference that could have facilitated denial-of-service attacks. Successful exploitation would have frozen smart contract operations and disrupted Telegram's miniapp ecosystem, which depends heavily on TON's infrastructure.

TonBit's discovery came just before the Global Version 11 rollout, enabling developers to quietly patch the issue prior to mainnet implementation. This represents the third major vulnerability the firm has identified for TON, securing them another bug bounty from the Core team. The security group has maintained a perfect track record of uncovering threats before bad actors can weaponize them.