Telegram is dropping its plans to launch its TON cryptocurrency project, after the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) refused to distribute it both to investors and worldwide.
“Today is a sad day for us here at Telegram. We are announcing the discontinuation of our blockchain project,” Pavel Durov, the founder of Telegram wrote on his channel on Tuesday.
The blockchain platform Telegram Open Network (TON) was a blockchain platform designed to offer decentralised cryptocurrency to anyone with a smartphone, in a similar fashion to Facebook’s Libra project, the Verge reported.
“The technology we created allowed for an open, free, decentralized exchange of value and ideas. TON had the potential to revolutionize how people store and transfer funds and information,” Durov said.
The “next-generation blockchain platform” called TON and cryptocurrency project – to be named GRAM -, was being prepared for two and a half years but was eventually blocked by New York’s Southern District court, which supported that “a US citizen might find some way of accessing the TON platform after it launched.”
“So, to prevent this, grams shouldn’t be allowed to be distributed anywhere in the world – even if every other country on the planet seemed to be perfectly fine with TON,” Durov added.
In April, Telegram, which has more than 400 million users, said it would launch TON by April 2021. In October 2019, the SEC sought a temporary restraining order against the Telegram blockchain project, stopping them temporarily from offering, selling, delivering or distributing its GRAM coin, Forbes reported.
