The Rebirth of TON Renewing Ties with Telegram, Enabling Web3 Applications for 800 Million Users

TON Rebirth Renewing Ties with Telegram, Enabling Web3 Apps for 800M Users

Author: Chloe, LianGuaiNews

On September 13th, Telegram and the TON Foundation announced their official partnership at the Token2049 event in Singapore, integrating the TON self-custody cryptocurrency wallet “TON SLianGuaice”. This means that all Telegram wallet users will be able to use TON SLianGuaice starting today, and the service is expected to be rolled out to Telegram users worldwide in November this year.

At the Token 2049 event, Telegram CTO John Hyman and TON Foundation President Steven Yun attended the speech together. Steven Yun stated that projects built on the TON blockchain will have the opportunity to participate in Telegram’s advertising platform, Telegram Ads. Steven even said, “Telegram will only integrate with the TON blockchain.”

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Telegram, a globally popular social communication software with over 800 million users, has instantly become a gold mine in the TON ecosystem. TON has not made a choice between “focusing on making products or services the best” and “relying on marketing methods to expand users.” It can be said that it appeared from the beginning to serve Telegram, although there were many obstacles along the way, it is inevitable that these 800 million people will eventually come into contact with the TON ecosystem.

In addition, Steven also set expectations for the integration of the two parties. “It is estimated that in the next 3-5 years, about 30% of Telegram’s active users will enter the TON blockchain, laying the foundation for the wider adoption of Web3 technology.”

Indeed, Steven’s words make sense. In the past, the biggest difficulty for blockchain projects to acquire new users was not the difficulty of use, but the high barrier to entry for users. However, TON can basically seamlessly integrate with Telegram. Taking the payment function as a simple example, Telegram users can directly send TON and BTC to friends in chat rooms, similar to WeChat Pay. This simple operation is the key point for Web3 to break through.

A few days after the Token 2049 event, on September 15th, Telegram founder LianGuaiVel Durov congratulated TON on his Telegram. He stated, “Years ago, we built a scalable and fast blockchain technology called TON, to serve hundreds of millions of users on Telegram, and successfully demonstrated the potential of Web 3.0 on Telegram. For the first time in history, users can directly own their own social media identity. Now Telegram is taking blockchain technology one step further by integrating it into Telegram, which is our cooperation with the TON community, adding their TON wallet as a mini-application to Telegram.”

Durov also announced that Telegram and the TON blockchain will have closer cooperation, and teased that starting from November this year, the TON wallet will be open to all users outside the United States and some other countries/regions.

Three years after being shut down due to regulation, the new version of TON and Telegram join hands again

In 2017, Telegram developed a blockchain project called Telegram Open Network (first-generation TON). As an L1 public chain backed by Telegram and highly regarded, TON’s initial goal was to establish an entire blockchain ecosystem and issue native encrypted assets called Gram.

In 2018, TON conducted its first token issuance to specific investors and raised a total of 1.7 billion USD, making it the second-largest ICO fundraising project in history at the time.

In October 2019, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) suddenly announced “emergency action and obtained a temporary restraining order” against TON. The SEC believed that Gram was an unregistered security and therefore could not be sold to U.S. investors. Of the raised 1.7 billion USD from the previous year, over 400 million USD came from U.S. investors. Therefore, the SEC had the authority to immediately issue injunctions, expedited discovery, return illegal gains, prohibit them from selling or distributing more Gram, and impose civil fines.

In response, Telegram filed an appeal the next day, arguing that once TON was launched, Gram would only be a currency or commodity, similar to gold and silver, but the SEC still insisted that Telegram had violated U.S. securities laws.

Originally, investors expected the “launch of the Telegram blockchain network unaffected by regulatory events,” but the reality turned out to be completely different from what they imagined.

The key point of separation between Telegram and TON was May 8, 2020. Unable to wait for Telegram to resolve its regulatory issues, TON Labs, Telegram’s technical partner, released a forked version called Free TON. TON Labs CEO Alexander Filatov emphasized that to distinguish it from the original TON version, this forked version was called Free TON and the token was named “Ton Crystals”. Telegram did not participate in TON Labs’ release. This was essentially an independent release of open-source software.

At that time, the token supply limit was also 5 billion, of which 85% would be distributed for free to TON partners and users, 10% to developers, and 5% to validating nodes.

Shortly after, on May 13, 2020, Telegram founder LianGuaivel Durov publicly announced the abandonment of the TON blockchain project and was fined 18.5 million USD by the SEC. “Over the past two and a half years, we have invested a lot of manpower and effort in researching the underlying technology of blockchain, surpassing Bitcoin and Ethereum in terms of speed, scalability, and other performance aspects. I am very proud of the progress TON has made today, but now we have to announce the closure of TON due to interference from the U.S. court.”

Regarding GRAM, Durov explained in a letter to investors why the U.S. court prohibited TON from selling its token GRAM to investors from the United States and around the world. Durov stated in the letter that this was absurd. “Unfortunately, we, who represent 96% of the world’s population, must comply with decisions made by the 4% of Americans elected to make them.”

Finally, Durov also publicly stated that in the future, other cryptocurrency projects will use the name and technology of TON. He stated at the time that Telegram would “not” support them in any way.

In May 2021, the developer community called NEWTON continued to research TON instead of Telegram. NEWTON was spontaneously formed by the Telegram community and is independent of Telegram. It was renamed TON Foundation in 2021, and TON changed from Telegram Open Network to The Open Network. The encrypted token on the chain also changed from Gram to Ton Coin.

However, although Durov previously stated that he would no longer participate in any technical development of TON, he still strongly supports TON Foundation and TON blockchain, and actively participates in cooperation to promote the development of the project.

On April 12, 2022, TON Foundation officially announced the launch of its first ecosystem fund “TONcoin Fund” and received a $250 million investment from institutions and exchanges such as Huobi Incubator, KuCoin Ventures, MEXC Pioneer Fund, 3Commas Capital, TON Miners, and Kilo Funds. The fund will be used to finance, incubate, hackathons, educational programs, and grants for projects developed based on TON.

Different from TON, Durov’s key change from not caring to “must support”?

Although TON and the project initially founded by Durov used the same abbreviation, it no longer represents Telegram Open Network. On the contrary, when TON abandoned by Durov turned to be governed by developers, the team not only re-adjusted the purpose of the project, but also called it “The Open Network”, and used Ton Coin as the token instead of the native currency Gram of the Telegram TON project.

At first, Durov dismissed the project and even warned followers that this TON has nothing to do with Telegram. But since last year, it is obvious that Durov has changed his attitude.

On August 23, 2022, Durov publicly praised the domain auction conducted by TON. He believed that Telegram might also launch an auction market for usernames, groups, and channels, and try to use TON (The Open Network) as the underlying blockchain of this market in the future. Then on December 7 last year, Telegram officially announced that users can have a Telegram account without a SIM card and use an anonymous number supported by the Fragment platform’s blockchain. Related reading: “Telegram launches blockchain-based anonymous login, the price of anonymous accounts on Fragment will rise.”

Durov also said that he was “impressed” by the recent TON domain auction and asked everyone to imagine how successful Telegram, which has 800 million users, will be in the future.

Now it can be seen that TON Foundation and Telegram have officially announced their partnership and launched the self-hosted encrypted wallet TON SLianGuaice for users, which can be regarded as truly ending their years of love and hate. We can also look forward to the effects that the emergence of 800 million users will bring in the future.

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