The TON Foundation, an organization developing the Telegram-initiated blockchain project, the TON blockchain, on Tuesday officially announced that TON miners have mined the final toncoin.

"Tens of thousands of miners have mined the entire issuance of toncoins, which was about 5 billion tokens,” TON Foundation founding member and core developer Anatoly Makosov said in a statement to Cointelegraph. The last toncoin was mined on June 28, he noted.

The end of toncoin mining marks a major milestone in TON's distribution, starting its new era as an entirely PoS blockchain. From now on, new toncoins will only enter circulation via PoS validation, the TON Foundation said. That will result in a cut in the total influx of new toncoins into the network by around 75% to the existing limit of 200,000 tokens per day.

The TON price has immediately reacted to the news, surging 34% over the past 24 hours. The token is trading at $1.41, according to data from CoinGecko.

By definition, proof-of-stake, or PoS, is a consensus algorithm that operates depending on a validator’s stake in the network. The PoS algorithm is opposed to proof-of-work, or PoW, the original consensus algorithm of major cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH), which is based on blocks validated through computing power provided by miners.

According to TON's whitepaper, its blockchain uses a PoS approach for generating new blocks. However, its unique infrastructure somehow allowed miners to generate toncoins using the PoW consensus as well, Makosov stated:

“If you put the entire coin issuance of the blockchain on such a smart contract, you get a PoS blockchain, but with a distribution of coins in the form of mining. As far as we know no one has done this before,”