Building a smart contract on TON used to require the kind of patience normally reserved for DMV visits. That changes now, at least according to Pavel Durov, who announced that TON Core’s new AI-powered toolchain, called Acton, can make the entire process ten times faster.
Acton launched on May 8, 2026, and its core pitch is straightforward: take the tedious, manual work out of smart contract development and let AI handle the heavy lifting. The tool automates the transformation of smart contract templates into autonomous agents, effectively eliminating the need for developers to write boilerplate code by hand.
What Acton actually does
The toolchain ships with a unified command line interface (CLI) built around Tolk, TON’s programming framework. That single CLI covers the entire development lifecycle, from initial project setup to testing, deployment on the TON mainnet, and dApp integration.
The initial focus is on Jettons, which are TON’s standard token format, roughly equivalent to ERC-20 tokens on Ethereum. Acton includes pre-built modules for standard TON contract patterns, with particular emphasis on Jetton creation and complex multi-step contract sequences.
The deployment process itself gets a simplification pass too. Acton provides step-by-step guidance for deploying contracts to TON’s mainnet, lowering the barrier for developers who might be experienced coders but new to blockchain-specific deployment quirks.
The AI angle and why it matters
The tool is designed from the ground up to work with AI models that can interpret templates and generate functional contract code. The autonomous agent conversion piece is the key differentiator. An autonomous agent, in blockchain terms, is a smart contract that can execute complex decision trees and multi-step processes without human intervention after deployment. Acton’s approach is to let developers define the behavior they want using templates, then let AI handle the translation into executable contract logic.
This positions TON in a very specific competitive lane. While Ethereum’s Layer 2 ecosystem and Solana have been racing to attract developers through lower fees and faster transaction speeds, TON is betting that AI-augmented developer experience can be the differentiator.
What this means for investors and the broader ecosystem
Look, a 10x speed improvement is the kind of claim that deserves a raised eyebrow. Durov is not exactly known for underselling his products. But even if the real-world improvement lands at three to five times faster, that’s still a meaningful shift in the competitive landscape for developer tooling.
For TON’s existing ecosystem, faster smart contract development means faster time-to-market for new dApps. That could accelerate the growth of TON’s DeFi sector, its NFT marketplace, and its integration with Telegram’s massive user base, which remains TON’s single biggest distribution advantage over virtually every other Layer 1.
Watch for two signals in the coming months: the number of new smart contracts deployed on TON’s mainnet, and whether any notable development teams publicly migrate their workflows to Acton.
