n a recent post on the official TON board, Telegram confirmed the launch of the TON blockchain. This comes after rumours of the network shutting down before launch.
Telegram has recently announced in a post on the TON board that the blockchain will be open to the public later in the month. The Telegram Open Network blockchain has been preparing for this launch for over 1 year. After a round of funding in September 2018, the funders stipulated that the blockchain had to be released by October of 2019 or the finding would have to be returned.
Message Board
On the message board, Telegram posted this message,
“October launch is confirmed!
Original investors received emails from the Telegram core team.
Key items:
1. Following a successful initial testing period, TON is planned to be launched in late October.
2. Investors are provided with the TON Key Generation Software: https://generator.ton.org
3. Investors will have to provide Telegram with the public key to receive their Grams by October 16th. This key will be confirmed using credentials provided in the Token Purchase Agreement.
4. The entire source code of TON is available at https://github.com/ton-blockchain/ton.
5. Investors have to select validators. Neither Telegram nor the TON Foundation will serve as validators post-launch.
We will follow up with the additional analysis.”
What is Telegram Open Network?
Telegram Open Network (TON) is a blockchain network project designed to be fast, secure, scalable and capable of handling millions of transactions per second. TON is designed to be a competitor to Ethereum’s smart contracts and decentralized applications while also being extremely scalable.
Why TON?
According to Telegram, TON has been created in response to the inability of existing blockchain platforms to push for mainstream cryptocurrency adoption. TON’s solution meets the speed and scalability needs required for mass adoption of cryptocurrency while retaining its decentralized nature.
What is Gram?
The Gram token is the native utility token of TON and it is denoted by the TON triangular symbol. Gram will serve as the principal cryptocurrency for the in-app economy on Telegram and will also be available for external use. Gram will serve as the principal cryptocurrency for the in-app economy on Telegram and will also be available for external use. Until now, the only way to buy Gram tokens has been through private sale rounds, which were not open to the public. The Gram Token Sale on Liquid will be the first opportunity for the general public to buy Gram tokens. They anticipate Gram becoming one of the largest cryptocurrencies by market cap, as well as potentially the world’s most adopted cryptocurrency with the coming launch of TON to Telegram’s 200 million active users.
What are the use cases of Gram?
Gram will be used for a variety of services on TON. Services will include:
- Commission (“gas”) paid to TON nodes (“validators”) for processing transactions and smart contracts.
- Stakes deposited by validators to be eligible to validate transactions and generate new blocks and coins.
- Capital lent out to validators in exchange for a share of their reward.
- Voting power required to support or oppose changes in the parameters of the protocol.
- Payment for services provided by apps built on the platform (TON Services) Payment for storing data securely in a decentralized way (TON Storage).
- Payment for registering blockchain-based domain names (TON DNS) and hosting TON-sites (TON WWW).
- Payment for hiding identity and IP addresses (TON Proxy).
- Payment for bypassing censorship imposed by local ISPs (TON Proxy).
- Gram will also be available for use outside of TON like any other cryptocurrency currently in the market.
