Basechain
Workchain with ID 0 — TON's primary working blockchain. Hosts user wallets, jettons, NFTs, and essentially all traffic an ordinary user touches.
Aliases: basic workchain, workchain 0
Basechain is the workchain with ID 0 — the primary blockchain in TON where ordinary activity happens. User wallets, jettons, NFTs, DEX contracts, and almost every smart contract a normal user interacts with live here.
Why ID 0
TON’s architecture allows up to 2³² workchains with different VM configurations, fee rules, and address formats. In practice only two run today:
- Masterchain (
-1) — the coordination chain with its own validator set. - Basechain (
0) — the working chain for user load.
The rest exist only in the spec; nothing has been deployed because there’s no demand.
How it appears in addresses
An address prefix of 0: means basechain, -1: means masterchain. So 0:abc… is an ordinary user address, and the EQ… / UQ… base64 forms you see in wallets are basechain addresses. Masterchain addresses are rare and reserved for infrastructure (validator-related, governance).
Shards inside basechain
Basechain splits into shardchains automatically as load grows. Each shard processes transactions independently, so basechain scales horizontally. For the user this is invisible — wallets work against an address, and the network handles shard routing.
In short: when you say “TON” in everyday speech, you usually mean basechain. The masterchain is plumbing; the other workchain IDs are a future option no one has needed yet.