tac.build is the project page for TAC Network — an EVM-compatible chain engineered to plug directly into TON, and through TON, into the inside of Telegram. It is the first chain we operate that has a credible answer to a question the rest of the EVM world has been struggling with for years: how do you ship EVM dApps to users who don't have, and don't want, a MetaMask wallet?
After running TAC infrastructure since the early mainnet window, this is our read on what the project actually is, what it changes for the EVM ecosystem, and why the path to a billion Telegram users runs through it.
What TAC is
TAC is an EVM execution layer positioned alongside TON. The tooling developers already know — Solidity, Foundry, Hardhat, viem — works without modification. The difference is the user side: a TAC dApp can be reached, signed for, and paid into directly from a TON wallet, with no MetaMask install and no chain-switching ritual.
From the developer's point of view, TAC looks like an EVM chain. From the user's point of view, it looks like a TON application. The bridge between those two worldviews is a dedicated cross-chain messaging layer that translates user intent on the TON side into EVM execution on the TAC side, and routes the result back.
Why this matters
The EVM ecosystem has spent years failing to cross a single, stubborn boundary: the wallet. Telling a TON user — already on-chain, already comfortable signing transactions, already holding assets — to install MetaMask, generate a seed phrase, and bridge funds into a foreign chain is asking them to start over. Most don't. The friction is not technical, it is cognitive.
TAC's architectural answer is to remove the boundary entirely. The EVM contracts deploy on TAC. The user signs on TON. The cross-chain messaging layer does the rest. The user never knows they're touching an EVM dApp — they just see a Telegram-native interaction with a result that arrives in their wallet.
How DeFi reaches Telegram's billion users
Telegram has on the order of a billion monthly active users globally. TON is the chain Telegram has natively integrated, with wallet support exposed inside the Telegram client itself. That makes TON the most direct on-ramp on the planet — a TON wallet is one tap from a Telegram conversation.
What's been missing is what users actually do with that wallet. TON's native application stack is real but narrow; the depth of liquidity, primitives and product variety that exists in the EVM world has no equivalent on TON natively. TAC closes that gap by making the entire EVM dApp surface — DEXes, lending markets, perps, stablecoins, structured products — reachable from inside the wallet a Telegram user already has.
The user journey collapses to:
- Open Telegram. Tap the wallet.
- Tap the dApp — which happens to live on TAC.
- Sign once. Wait a few seconds. See the result.
There is no "add network," no bridging UI, no asking the user to take custody of a new seed phrase. For the first time, the EVM dApp surface is reachable through a wallet that hundreds of millions of people already use.
What this changes for builders
TAC effectively gives EVM developers a path to a user base they could not previously address. A Solidity team that ships on TAC writes the same code they would write for any other EVM chain, but ships it into a market that is at least an order of magnitude larger than the entire current EVM wallet base.
We expect three categories of builder to move first:
- Stablecoin and payment rails — TON has retail and remittance flow that EVM stablecoins have never reached at scale.
- Lightweight DeFi — savings products, simple swaps, yield wrappers that benefit from being one-tap inside Telegram.
- Consumer and SocialFi — tipping, micro-payments, prediction markets, in-chat games where the wallet UX has historically killed the funnel.
Heavier DeFi primitives — perps, structured products, complex lending — will follow as TON-side liquidity deepens and the cross-chain UX gets sharper.
Where NodeStake fits in
NodeStake is a TAC mainnet validator and has received a delegation from the TAC Foundation. We've been operating TAC infrastructure since the early mainnet window — running both the validator and the cross-chain messaging stack that makes the TON-to-EVM path work in production.
Stake $TAC with NodeStake on the official staking app:
NodeStake's TAC infrastructure stack
Beyond validation, NodeStake operates the full public infrastructure stack for TAC. Everything is documented and ready to use on our network page at /networks/tac, including:
- Explorer — block, transaction and validator browsing.
- Guide — node setup and operator documentation.
- Endpoints — public RPC, EVM RPC, REST API and gRPC.
- Peers — live peer list for fast inbound connectivity.
- Seed Node — bootstrap your node from our seed.
- Addrbook — pre-populated address book for faster initial sync.
- State Sync — bring a fresh node into sync in minutes.
- Snapshots — pruned and archive snapshots, kept on a regular refresh cadence.
All endpoints sit behind the same SRE rotation, monitoring stack and SLAs we use for the 50+ networks we already operate.
Closing read
Bringing DeFi to a billion users is a sentence that has been said often enough to mean almost nothing. What's different about TAC is that the path is concrete: a real EVM chain, a real TON integration, real users already inside Telegram, and a real cross-chain messaging layer doing the unglamorous work of moving intent and assets between two ecosystems whose validator sets do not trust each other.
If even a small fraction of Telegram's user base ends up touching EVM DeFi through this path, TAC will have changed the addressable market for every Solidity team building today. We think it will.
About NodeStake
NodeStake is an institutional-grade validator and infrastructure operator running 50+ networks with $420M+ in delegated stake. Founded in 2019 with a perfect no-slashing record, we operate the full stack — validators, IBC relayers, public RPC endpoints, snapshots, and custom chain infrastructure — for protocols, foundations and institutional delegators across the Cosmos, EVM and emerging L1 ecosystems.
Website: https://nodestake.org
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