If you hold Wrapped TON on Ethereum or on $BNB Smart Chain, you have until September 1, 2026 to bring those tokens back into the TON network over the official bridge. After that the bridge is shut down, and any balance still sitting in wrapped form can no longer be unwound by this route. The mirror image applies to the so-called j-tokens on TON, meaning jUSDT, jUSDC, jDAI and jWBTC: those holdings have to go back to Ethereum beforehand.
The date has been fixed since May 23, 2026. It is therefore not a surprise event but a long-announced deadline now entering its final days. That is precisely what makes it dangerous: announced deadlines drop out of view because they look far off on first reading.
TON Bridge v3: what exactly is being shut down on September 1, 2026
What is being shut down is the cross-chain bridge at the address bridge-v3.ton.org. This bridge connects Toncoin with Ethereum and with $BNB Smart Chain. A cross-chain bridge is a pair of contracts on two blockchains that locks a balance on one side and issues a proxy token of the same size on the other.
The proxy in this case is called Wrapped TON. On Ethereum and on $BNB Smart Chain it carries the name Wrapped TON Coin and the ticker TONCOIN. Its value hangs solely on the bridge continuing to release the native tokens deposited behind it. Once that undertaking falls away, what remains is a token with no way back.
The shutdown affects neither the TON network itself nor your native Toncoin in a TON wallet. What is affected is exclusively the wrapped holdings on the two other chains and the j-tokens created in return on TON.
Why a bridge closes at all
According to the specialist service Cryptopolitan, over its lifetime the bridge handled 31,893 transfers totalling more than 101 million TON, without any attack on it succeeding. The operator side points to newer transfer routes that manage without a wrapper of their own and instead run over messaging protocols such as LayerZero, Stargate, Symbiosis and Rhino.fi. A bridge that is barely used any more but still has to fund contracts and oracle operation is, from the operator’s point of view, a cost item carrying residual risk.
Wrapped TON, jUSDT and jUSDC: which tokens the bridge shutdown hits
There are two directions, and many holders know only one of them.
The first direction is the better-known case. At some point you sent native Toncoin over the bridge to Ethereum or to $BNB Smart Chain in order to use them there on a trading venue or in a liquidity pool. What has been sitting in your wallet since then is Wrapped TON. Those holdings have to go back into the TON network.
The second direction concerns the j-tokens. These are the counterpart: stablecoins and other Ethereum tokens that were brought over to TON by the same bridge and sit there as jUSDT, jUSDC, jDAI or jWBTC. The letter j stands for their origin in this bridge. Anyone holding such balances has to move them back towards Ethereum and not into the TON network.
Anyone who used both directions, for instance by trading Toncoin on Ethereum while holding stablecoins on TON, has two jobs ahead of them. In practice this is often overlooked, because the second position sits in a different wallet app from the first.
How to recognise a j-token
In a TON wallet the name is usually spelled out, for example “jUSDT” or “Bridged $USDT“. What settles it is the contract address: a j-token comes from the bridge contract, while a native stablecoin on TON comes from the issuer itself. If you are unsure which position you hold, a look at the token’s issuer address in a TON explorer takes you further.
How much Wrapped TON was still sitting on Ethereum and $BNB Smart Chain eleven days before the deadline?
No current figure was publicly available on this question, so we gathered it ourselves.
On method: on August 21, 2026 at around 01:00 UTC we called the totalSupply function of the two Wrapped TON Coin contracts through public RPC endpoints and additionally verified the name, ticker and decimal places of each contract on-chain. Two contracts were checked with four calls each; the Ethereum value was queried through two mutually independent RPC providers and returned the same result both times.
The result: on Ethereum, 9,410,992.06 Wrapped TON were in circulation at the time of the survey, and 2,065,163.78 on $BNB Smart Chain. Together that is 11,476,155.84 tokens still sitting in wrapped form eleven days before the shutdown date. Both contracts work to nine decimal places, which we likewise queried rather than assumed.
On the equivalent value: at a Toncoin price of 1.19 euros, which we retrieved the same day through CoinGecko’s public price interface, the outstanding balance corresponds to roughly 13.7 million euros. This analysis was carried out by cryptoticker.io itself on August 21, 2026.
What we could not check belongs here too: we do not know what share of these tokens belongs to German holders, and we do not know how many of the addresses behind them are still being used at all. Part of the balance is likely to sit in the contracts of trading venues and liquidity pools rather than with private individuals. The j-token side on TON could not be counted with the same method either, because TON offers no EVM-compatible interface with the same function. The figure is therefore an upper bound for what retail investors still have to move, and not an estimate of the private share.
For context, Cryptopolitan gives 35,694 holders of Wrapped TON on Ethereum and 113,495 on $BNB Smart Chain for the bridge’s peak period. Measured against that, the outstanding residual balance is small. It is small only in aggregate, though, and not for the individual holder it belongs to.
Bringing Wrapped TON back: the return swap over the bridge step by step
The procedure is the familiar one, only in the other direction. You open the bridge at bridge-v3.ton.org, connect the wallet the wrapped tokens actually sit in, select Ethereum or $BNB Smart Chain as the source chain and TON as the target chain, enter the TON address the balance should arrive at, and confirm the transfer.
Three points decide whether this goes smoothly.
First, the destination address. What is required is an address on the TON network that you can access yourself. A trading venue’s deposit address is possible, but only if that venue explicitly supports deposits from the bridge. In case of doubt, your own TON wallet is the safer recipient, because you are then not dependent on a third party’s crediting practice.
Second, the network fee. Despite the fee waiver, the return swap still costs gas on the source chain. On Ethereum that can be noticeable depending on load, and you need ETH in the same wallet for it. Anyone holding only the token but no network currency cannot get out, and notices that only at the last moment.
Third, the approval. Before the transfer itself, the contract requires a token approval in which you permit the bridge to move your tokens. Check carefully which contract you are approving for what amount, and do not confirm an unlimited approval when a fixed amount is enough.
Partial amounts rather than everything at once
If you hold a larger position, a small test amount first is the calmer variant. If it arrives on the TON side, the rest follows. That costs gas once more and, if something goes wrong, spares you reaching for a position you can no longer get to.
jUSDT and jUSDC back to Ethereum: the reverse route over the same bridge
For the j-tokens the same screen applies, only with the fields swapped. The source chain is TON, the target chain is Ethereum, and the destination address is an Ethereum address you have access to.
One detail distinguishes this route from the first: what arrives on the Ethereum side is the actual stablecoin and not another proxy. jUSDT therefore becomes $USDT on Ethereum again. After that you hold an ordinary position on a chain that carries on, and you are no longer under deadline pressure.
Here too you need no balance on the target side, but you do need enough TON on the source side for the network fee. Anyone who has emptied their TON balance completely in order to leave nothing behind can no longer move their own j-tokens. So leave a small remainder in place until all positions have been moved.
Fee waiver until the shutdown: what dropping the percentage bridge fee means
For the remaining time, the operator side has suspended the bridge’s percentage transfer fees. This is the one point where the deadline works in your favour: during this phase the return swap costs only the network fee of the respective chain.
In practice that means two things. For one, it becomes worthwhile to retrieve even smaller residual positions that would barely have added up under the earlier percentage fee. For another, an argument that has moved many holders to wait falls away. Anyone who has put off the return swap for reasons of cost now has the cheapest moment this bridge will ever offer.
A note on the chain: on $BNB Smart Chain, network fees are in experience considerably lower than on Ethereum. Anyone holding positions on both chains and working with a limited gas budget sensibly starts with the more expensive chain, while there is still time to choose the moment calmly.
Exchange account, software wallet or DeFi pool: where your Wrapped TON actually sits
Before you move anything, you have to know where the position stands at all. There are three typical cases, and they call for different steps.
If the token sits in a wallet of your own, you have the matter in your own hands and work through the steps above. Which wallet programs handle which chains is set out in our comparison of software wallets.
If the token sits in an exchange account, the trading venue decides. Some venues carry out the swap for their customers themselves, others announce a withdrawal deadline, and others say nothing at all. Do not rely on a general announcement here; look for the notice relating to your specific provider. Anyone wanting to relocate the position anyway will find the venues with suitable deposit and withdrawal routes for the TON network in the exchange comparison.
If the token sits in a liquidity pool or as collateral in a lending protocol, the route is longer. First the position has to be unwound or the loan repaid, then the return swap follows. This case needs the most lead time and is typically noticed latest.
The quiet fourth case
There are holdings that appear in none of these categories: tokens in an old wallet whose access details are somewhere but have not been needed for years. If you worked with this bridge at all between 2021 and today, it is worth looking into the address you used back then. The effort is a quarter of an hour, and after September 1 it is wasted.
Tax on the bridge return swap: why timing and amount belong in your records
Whether retrieving a wrapped token is a tax-relevant event in Germany depends on whether the wrapper is regarded as the same asset or a different one. This question is not conclusively settled, and it is handled differently in practice. We described the starting position in our article on wrapped and staked holdings.
Regardless of that dispute, you can document. Record on what day you brought back what amount over the bridge, which address sent and which received, and what the transaction cost in network fees. Anyone wanting to evidence the acquisition date of their Toncoin will later need this chain without gaps. A portfolio tracker takes the work off your hands if you set it up now and not next spring; which programs assign bridge transactions cleanly is shown by our comparison of tax and portfolio tools.
For clarity: this is not tax advice, and an individual case belongs in expert hands. The documentation costs you two minutes on the day of the return swap and cannot be made up later.
Legacy bridge and Bridge v3: why there are two shutdowns and which one counts now
Confusion arises here regularly, so here is the distinction in plain terms. There has already been a shutdown in the TON world before: the older Toncoin bridge from the network’s early days was decommissioned back in 2025. Anyone who acted then and retrieved their holdings at that time is not the addressee of the current deadline.
The date of September 1, 2026 concerns its successor, the bridge at bridge-v3.ton.org. Wrapping and unwrapping have run through this address since the first shutdown. If you have held Wrapped TON in recent years, this is with overwhelming probability the bridge in question.
The distinction is more than a footnote. Anyone who finds an old report about the first shutdown and concludes from it that the subject is closed for them lets the running deadline pass. In the network’s official developer documentation, the early bridges from the years 2021 to 2023 are expressly listed as legacy whose discontinuation is possible at any time; you can read this in the TON developer documents on bridges.
Deadline missed: what happens to Wrapped TON after September 1, 2026
After the shutdown date, the bridge accepts no further transfers. The proxy token remains visible in your wallet, and that is exactly where the trap lies: a balance that is displayed feels like it is there. What is missing is the mechanism that turns it back into native Toncoin.
Such a token remains tradable only for as long as somebody can be found who will accept it. After a bridge shutdown, that willingness disappears quickly in experience, because the equivalent value is no longer secured. Whether a follow-up procedure will be set up later is open, and nobody should base their own planning on it.
A comparable case is running in parallel right now: the migration from ICX to SODA also has a staggered deadline, after which a swap is possible in one direction only. The pattern is the same in both cases. First a function is restricted, then it is switched off, and the announcement comes months before the day that counts.
Checking the TON bridge deadline: what you should take away
- Establish your holdings today, not on August 31. Open every wallet you have ever used with this bridge and check for Wrapped TON on Ethereum and $BNB Smart Chain as well as for j-tokens on the TON network. Which wallet programs display which chains and tokens correctly is set out in the comparison of software wallets.
- Bring them back while the percentage fee is suspended. Make sure you have network currency on the source chain, test with a small amount and then send the rest. If the balance sits in an exchange account, clarify responsibility with your provider; trading venues with suitable TON connectivity can be found in the exchange comparison.
- Document the transaction before you close the wallet. Date, amount, sending and receiving address, network fee. A tax and portfolio tool handles the allocation if you connect it before the return swap.
(As of August 21, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)
