✅ Ton Safety: Messages

A fairly unique feature of the TON blockchain is that wallets can send and receive messages. Let us take a look at some of the use cases, and also any dangers.

What are messages?

You'll notice when you send payments from your TonSafe that there is a message box. You may also have seen messages on your incoming payments. Messages are sometimes called "comment" or "memo" — it's the same thing.

Important background

TonSafe has a red ? symbol to the right of the message box, if you tap on this you'll get some information about messages: that these are sent in plain text onto the TON blockchain where they permanently reside, they cannot be deleted later, and they cannot be edited. They are visible to anyone at any time using a TON explorer.

Dangers

Before looking at how TonSafe "messages" can and are being used, let us first warn of the dangers - quite simply, because of the messages feature, TON Wallets are often spammed by unscrupolous advertisers and also many scammers. Whenever you see any small incoming payment with a message offering you something, or asking you to do something, do not act on it. It's just like Email or SMS spam, ignore it.

TonSafe will be implementing Spam filters in future updates, to protect against this annoyance and the risk that users may fall for tricks such as messages claiming to come from this or that organization, even TonSafe, to trick unwary users.

Use Cases

So now, what are possible use cases for the "Message" feature in TonSafe?

One common use is that this "memo" or Message comment is required when sending TON to some exchanges, because the exchange needs you to put a reference code there so that they can identify who an incoming payment is from.

Another use case is that you may wish to keep a record of what a payment was for, or to inform the person that you are paying, what the payment is for. Keep in mind that this is visible to anyone else, permanently, so it should be used with that consideration.

Why at least 0.1 TON? Firstly, because this is unlikely to trigger any spam filter or be ignored as likely spam, and secondly because this is the threshold for a TonSafe to TonSafe incoming payment notification on the receiving person's phone.

Other use cases include trying to contact someone that you only know the wallet address for, for example, if you sent them a payment by mistake and are asking them to be kind enough to return the payment.

The longer your message, the more blockchain fees you will pay. A message the size of an SMS or Tweet it won't cost you more than 1 cent though and if you try to send the chapter of a book it'll cut off around 0.5 TON — obviously don't do that, even though TonSafe currently allows messages over 20,000 characters long!