Whales Pool

Whales Pool is one of the oldest and most recognizable staking pools on TON. The brand belongs to Whales Corp, the team that also built the Tonhub wallet and many of the engineering tools the wider ecosystem relies on.

Who Whales Corp are

Whales Corp is an independent development team that has been working with TON since the network’s earliest days. Their flagship products include:

• Tonhub — one of the first non-custodial TON wallets.
• Whales Pool — a public staking pool that accepts deposits from regular Toncoin holders.
• Open-source libraries and developer tools used by a meaningful share of the ecosystem.

Because the team ships both a wallet and a pool, the “Whales” name appears in two contexts at once: as core infrastructure and as a DeFi protocol. They are technically separate products under one brand.

Whales as a staking pool

For most of TON’s history retail staking was only possible through nominator pools — contracts that aggregate stake from many depositors and delegate it to a single validator. Whales Pool was among the first such pools available to consumers:

• The minimum deposit was much lower than running a validator yourself, which requires tens of thousands of Toncoin.
• The pool handled validator slot bidding and managed rotation cycles.
• Rewards were distributed pro-rata to depositors, minus the team’s fee.

Through the Tonhub interface staking became a built-in wallet feature, so users could enter the pool without learning the nominator pool mechanics in detail.

Whales and liquid staking

As liquid staking matured on TON, Whales evolved into the LST format: depositors receive a tradable receipt token representing their share, and that token can be used elsewhere in DeFi — LP pools, lending, collateralized borrowing. Functionally this puts Whales close to Tonstakers, bemo, and Hipo, but the deep integration with Tonhub gives the brand a loyal pre-existing audience.

Considerations and risks

• Infrastructure profile. “Whales” is not a single product but a wallet plus a pool from the same team. That tight coupling is convenient, yet it correlates risk: a problem in one product can spill into the other.
• Validator concentration. As with any staking pool, validator-set diversification matters. If all of a pool’s validators run on the same hardware or hosting, a single outage can hit them simultaneously.
• Smart-contract audits. Whales contracts have been audited, but as everywhere in DeFi audits do not provide an absolute guarantee.
• Alternatives. Whales is one of several public TON pools — Tonstakers, bemo, and Hipo are also viable, and many users split stake across providers.

For long-time TON users Whales remains a familiar name: it is both the Tonhub wallet they likely used first and one of the original ways to earn staking yield without launching a validator of their own.