The Open Network (TON) has confirmed that the Toncoin and Token Bridge at bridge-v3.ton.org will cease all operations permanently on September 1, 2026, drawing the curtain on an infrastructure that was behind the blockchain’s earliest days of cross-chain connectivity. It was stated in the announcement, which was published on the TON Status Telegram channel, that all previously submitted user transfers have been processed, and for transfers that had been executed but not yet claimed, the required network fees on both the TON and EVM chains were covered, and those transfers were completed. In a further concession to users, all percentage-based transfer fees have been waived for the remainder of the withdrawal period. What do Toncoin and Token Bridge users need to do before the deadline? TON’s post states that users holding Wrapped Toncoin in an Ethereum or BNB Smart Chain wallet must bridge it back to the TON network before September 1, 2026. It asked users who had wrapped Toncoin in Ethereum or BNB Smart Chain wallets to bridge it back to TON holders. Also, users who hold j-tokens on their TON wallets, including jUSDT, jUSDC, jDAI, jWBTC, and any other bridge-issued equivalents, must bridge those assets back to Ethereum. As part of the final operational steps, bridge oracles will withdraw their staked TON in June 2026, though they will continue processing transfers through to the final shutdown date. Why is the bridge being retired? The shutdown has been long coming, as TON officially announced in April 2025 that it was retiring its legacy Toncoin bridge. It stated that the maturation of its own ecosystem was the reason for shutting down the bridge. As of May 10, 2025, users could no longer bridge Toncoin from TON to Ethereum or BNB Smart Chain; however, inbound bridging and past transfer claims were preserved pending a future date for announcing its own sunset event. That announcement has now arrived. When the bridge launched, with the Ethereum version going live in August 2021 and the BNB Smart Chain version following in October that same year, Toncoin was not yet listed on centralized exchanges, and there was no native decentralized finance infrastructure on the network. The bridge was, for a period, the only viable route for users wishing to trade Toncoin, routing funds through platforms such as Uniswap and PancakeSwap. Token Bridge v3, which enabled j-token transfers, was launched in April 2023. The decision to retire the infrastructure followed the successful deprecation of jUSDT, the Tether-wrapped stablecoin issued via the bridge. The emergence of native USDt on TON, alongside a thriving DEX ecosystem, had rendered the bridge’s original function redundant. What has the bridge achieved, and what replaces it? As of the first time it announced that it was retiring the bridge last year, it had processed 31,893 transfers and moved more than 101 million TON tokens, all without a single successful hack or exploit and with every transfer accounted for and claimable. At its peak, Wrapped Toncoin on Ethereum had accumulated 35,694 holders and recorded over 460,000 transactions; on BNB Smart Chain, it reached 113,495 holders and more than 2.6 million transactions. TON has already integrated with LayerZero, Stargate, Symbiosis, and Rhino.fi, platforms that offer native asset transfers without the wrapped-token mode, among other security and platform features. Stargate, which is built on LayerZero’s omnichain messaging protocol, supports transfers across more than 80 chains with unified liquidity pools and near-instant settlement. The transition, TON says, improves user safety by retiring older infrastructure and encourages adoption of modern, scalable cross-chain tools. However, LayerZero has recently come under heat for the role it played in the Kelp DAO exploit that occurred in April. That incident led to some protocols ditching the platform in favor of rival platform Chainlink. If you're reading this, you’re already ahead. Stay there with our newsletter .
