TON is reborn: Renewing its relationship with Telegram, will 800 million users realize large-scale application of Web3?

On September 13, Telegram and the TON Foundation announced at the Token2049 event in Singapore that the two parties had officially reached a partnership and integrated the self-hosted encryption wallet "TON Space" launched by TON. In other words, all Telegram wallet users will be able to use TON Space from now on, and the next step is to roll out the service to Telegram users around the world in November this year.

At the Token 2049 event, Telegram CTO John Hyman and TON Foundation President Steven Yun attended a speech. Steven Yun said that future projects built on the TON blockchain will have priority to participate in Telegram's advertising platform Telegram Ads. Steven even said that "Telegram will only be integrated with the TON blockchain."

With more than 800 million users worldwide, the popular social messaging software Telegram has instantly become a gold mine for the TON ecosystem. TON has made no choice between "focusing on making its products or services the best" and "relying on marketing to expand users." It can be said that it emerged to serve Telegram from the beginning. Although there were many obstacles in the process, it will definitely be a matter of time before these 800 million people are finally exposed to the TON ecosystem.

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

Indeed, what Steven said makes sense. In the past, the biggest difficulty in acquiring new users for blockchain projects was not the difficulty of using it, 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 send TON and BTC directly to friends in the chat room. The usage is similar to WeChat payment. This simple operation is the key point for Web3 to break out of the circle.

A few days after the Token 2049 event, Telegram founder Pavel Durov posted a message on his Telegram to congratulate TON on September 15. He said, "Years ago, we built TON, a scalable and fast blockchain technology. In order to serve hundreds of millions of users on Telegram, we also successfully demonstrated the potential of Web 3.0 on Telegram, and even users can use it for the first time in history." Directly have your own social media identity. Now Telegram is taking one step further to integrate blockchain technology into Telegram, that is, we are working with people in the TON community to add their TON wallets to Telegram as mini-applications.

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

Closed three years ago due to regulatory issues, the new version of TON and Telegram join hands again

In 2017, Telegram developed a blockchain project called Telegram Open Network (the first generation TON). As an L1 public chain that has been favored many times by Telegram, TON initially appeared on the market with the goal of establishing an entire The blockchain ecosystem also issued Gram, a native encrypted asset.

In 2018, TON conducted an initial coin offering to specific investors and raised a total of US$1.7 billion. At that time, this figure became the second largest ICO fundraising project in history.

In October 2019, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) suddenly announced that it had taken "emergency action and obtained a temporary restraining order" against TON. The SEC believes that Gram is an unregistered security under the Securities Act of 1933 and therefore cannot be sold to U.S. investors. Of the $1.7 billion raised last year, more than $400 million came from U.S. investors. Therefore, the SEC has the authority to issue immediate injunctions, quickly obtain evidence, return ill-gotten gains, prohibit them from selling or distributing more Grams, and impose civil penalties.

Telegram appealed the next day, arguing that once TON was launched, GRAM would be just a currency or commodity, no different from gold and silver. However, the SEC still insisted that Telegram had violated U.S. securities laws.

Investors were originally looking forward to "the Telegram blockchain network will be launched as usual without being affected by regulatory incidents," but the reality was completely different from what they imagined.

The key point in time for the separation of Telegram and TON was May 8, 2020. Unable to wait for Telegram to resolve regulatory issues, Telegram’s technology partner TON Labs first released a forked version called Free TON. TON Labs CEO Alexander Filatov emphasized that in order to be consistent with the original To distinguish it from the TON version, this forked version is called Free TON, the token name is "Ton Crystals" and Telegram did not participate in the release of TON Labs . This is essentially an independent release of open source software.

At that time, the token supply limit was also 5 billion, 85% will be distributed free of charge to TON partners and users, 10% to developers, and 5% to verification nodes.

Soon after, on May 13, 2020, Telegram founder Pavel Durov publicly announced that he was abandoning the blockchain project TON and was fined US$18.5 million by the SEC. "In the past two and a half years, we have spent a lot of manpower and energy researching the underlying technology of the blockchain, which far exceeds Bitcoin and Ethereum in terms of speed, scalability and other performance. What I have achieved for TON today We are very proud of the progress, but now we have to announce the closure of TON due to interference from the US court.”

Regarding GRAM, Durov explained in a letter to investors that the reason why the U.S. court banned TON is because TON is not allowed to sell its token GRAM to investors in the United States and even from around the world. Durov stated this in the letter It's ridiculous. "Unfortunately, we, 96 percent of the world's population, must listen to policymakers chosen by only 4 percent of Americans."

Finally, Durov also announced that other cryptocurrency projects will use TON's name and technology in the future. He said at the time that Telegram "will not" take any way to support them in the future.

In May 2021, a developer community called NEWTON replaced Telegram to continue research on TON. NEWTON was spontaneously established by the Telegram community and is independent of Telegram. It was renamed the TON Foundation (TON Foundation) in 2021. TON was also founded by The original Telegram Open Network was changed to The Open Network, and the encryption token on the chain also changed from Gram to Ton Coin.

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

On April 12, 2022, the TON Foundation officially announced the official launch of its first ecosystem fund "TONcoin Fund", and received cooperation from institutions such as Huobi Incubator, KuCoin Ventures, MEXC Pioneer Fund, 3Commas Capital, TON Miners and Kilo Funds. Exchange's $250 million investment. The fund will be used to fund financing, incubation, hackathons, educational programs and grants for TON-based development projects.

Same as TON but different from his father, what is the key to Durov going from being initially unfavorable to "must support"?

Even though TON uses the same abbreviation as the project originally founded by Durov, it no longer stands for Telegram Open Network. Instead, when TON, abandoned by Durov, was moved to developer governance, the team not only repurposed the project, but also called it an "open network" with tokens using Ton Coin rather than the native tokens of the Telegram TON project. Currency Gram.

Although initially, Durov was dismissive of the project, even warning followers that TON had absolutely nothing to do with Telegram. But since last year, Durov has obviously 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 user names, groups and channel links, and tried to use TON (The Open Network) as the market in the future. the underlying blockchain. Then on December 7 last year, Telegram officially issued an announcement stating that users can have a Telegram account without a SIM card and log in using the anonymous number supported by the blockchain provided on the Fragment platform. Related reading: " Telegram launches blockchain-based anonymous login, the price of anonymous accounts on Fragment will increase "

Durov also said that he was "very impressed" by the recent TON domain name auction, and asked everyone to imagine how successful it would be if it connected with Telegram, which has 800 million users.

Now it can be seen that the TON Foundation and Telegram have officially announced their partnership and launched a self-hosted encrypted wallet TON Space for users. Is this a true end to the love-hate relationship between the two? We can also look forward to seeing what effects 800 million users will have if they leave the circle in the future.