Interview with the developer: AKIFOQ

[Vudi]

Developers in TON know such personality as Andrey akifoq. He disappeared from the developer chat room lately and I decided to interview him.

The answers came out very big, I tried to retell them as briefly as possible and on the merits.

Who are you and why akifoq?
I'm Andrei, a former Olympiadist, studied to be a pure mathematician. In TON I write smartcontracts and look for vulnerabilities, I am good at fift tricks, TVM-assembler and I know the intricacies of blockchain. I chose the nickname I liked best from randomly generated ones.

How did you get into TON?
I admired Telegram and the team working on it when I was a freshman. In particular, Nikolai Durov. It just so happened that I grew up practically in the same circles as he did.

When the Whitepaper and the rest of the documentation was leaked to the network in the spring of 2019, I just read it for fun and fell in love with the technology. In October of that year, Telegram held a contest to write smart contracts. I decided to participate and my work was evaluated, awarded 🥇 and an $8000 prize.

In June 2021, I wrote to Tola Janot that I wanted to work with them. They accepted all the Telegram winners at the time, so they accepted me, too.

What have you done on TON that's relevant now?
I worked on the TON-ETH bridge contract, reviewed old versions of the official nominator pool (there were significant problems there, which delayed the launch by almost a year at the end).

First time in history I wrote a doc on FunC (no documentation before that), by reading compiler sources 😃 I made up grammar of the language for highlighting plugin, figured out some advanced blockchain mechanisms, about which there was not much information in doc. Answered questions from now strong developers)

Doing anything in TON now?
Not actively involved yet. In general I consider working in TON as the main opportunity, and after the contract hacking contest it became much more relevant in my opportunity space (note Woody - Andrew hacked 2 contracts and got 8000 TON).

There was a tiff with the TON Foundation in the spring of 2022, do you take offense?
No, I'm not offended. Somehow I don't care anymore. But, coming back six months later, I was pleasantly surprised by the changes in TF's work and their interaction with the "public".

What do you think is missing in TON?
The active work of Nikolay and the team on the core components. There's a lot of promises in the piper which haven't been implemented yet. But TF is making some progress in this direction, which is great!

What makes you sick?
I used to get nauseated by the inadequately high conceit of some TF members: for example, when they said that you can't mine on GPU, it looked silly.

Now it feels noticeably better: particularly because they've started spending the fund to bring in strong outside teams. But also Rulon, interacting with the community, is good.

Any downsides to blockchain? Because Rulon keeps poking me in the nose with my article.

The disadvantages are the difficulties with asynchronous interaction of contracts and non-transactional chains of transactions. And a very limited possibility to use hash-maps.)

What's the good thing about TON, it's the best blockchain?
Nicolai's genius 🙂 He thought very well in advance about different components of the system, from cell trees for universal merkel-ruffs (including within contracts) to the high level of TVM architecture (the continuations for example). I haven't heard about this in any other popular blockchain.

Not to mention the idea of dynamic sharding and hypercube-rooting itself: architecturally it is the most advanced development of the sharding idea available.

Thank you Andrew! 🙂 Thanks.

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Vudi is the author of a channel about TON @investkingyru_en and an active participant in the TON ecosystem. He is also the founder of the blockchain collection kingyTON, based on the historical events of the TON project ton.org.in. If you find errors in this post, please let Vudi know on Telegram @kingyru.