Recently, the founder of Telegram, Pavel Durov, has announced the closure of the blockchain project Telegram Open Network (TON) due to the company’s ongoing legal fight with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The TON was meant to be a next-generation blockchain platform with its own cryptocurrency Gram. The TON developers claimed that their blockchain would be based on an advanced version of decentralized transactions used by Bitcoin and Ethereum. However, the US watchdog SEC banned the issuing of Gram tokens on the grounds that they should have been registered as securities. The court battle with the SEC had been going on for almost two years and resulted in Durov’s decision to abandon the project. “Today is a sad day for us here at Telegram. We are announcing the discontinuation of our blockchain project,” Pavel Durov wrote in his public channel. This was bad news for the TON investors as well. Notably, the crypto project raised $1.7 billion during its initial coin offering. However, in his post, Durov did not say whether all investors would be immediately refunded or how much they would receive.
