i. On October 31, 2023, TON set a world record.
Over a single performance test on a dedicated testnet, the network sustained 104,715 transactions per second — at the time the highest publicly reproducible throughput ever recorded by a layer-1 blockchain. The result was independently verified by CertiK and broadcast live from a control room running on a frozen dashboard now archived at live.ton.org.
ii. The engine was called a bomb.
The mechanism was a self-replicating smart contract: each call spawned more calls, and each of those spawned more — an exponential chain of internal messages that flooded every shard simultaneously. TON's own engineering blog referred to the construction as a bomb. The code lives in the official benchmark-contracts repository under the name Retranslator.
iii. Then it was over.
The testnet was dismantled. The dashboard at live.ton.org stopped ticking and was left frozen as a monument. The bomb was never armed again. What remains is a repository, an audit, a video recording, and a number — 104,715 — that no one has tried to beat on TON since.