Pavel Durov, the founder and chief executive of Messaging service Telegram, announced on Tuesday (May 13) that the company is abandoning its blockchain platform Telegram Open Network (TON) after a long legal battle with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
“Today is a sad day for us here at Telegram . We are announcing the discontinuation of our blockchain project,” Durov wrote in a blog post.
He added that a court made it impossible for Telegram, used by more than 400 million users, to continue development of Telegram Open Network (TON).
“How? Imagine that several people put their money together to build a gold mine – and to later split the gold that comes out of it,” he wrote.
“Then a judge comes and says: ‘These people invested in the gold mine because they were looking for profits. And they didn’t want that gold for themselves, they wanted to sell it to other people. Because of this, they are not allowed to get the gold.’”
“If this doesn’t make sense to you, you are not alone – but this is exactly what happened with TON (the mine) and Grams (the gold). A judge used this reasoning to rule that people should not be allowed to buy or sell Grams like they can buy or sell Bitcoins,” he added.
Durov's announcement left everyone stunned because just in April Telegram had assured people that it would launch TON by April 2021 and offered investors a refund of $1.2 billion.
According to Durov, the court also ruled out that Grams could not be distributed even outside of the US, as US citizens would have found workarounds to access the TON platform.
“Sadly, the US judge is right about one thing: we, the people outside the US, can vote for our presidents and elect our parliaments, but we are still dependent on the United States when it comes to finance and technology,” he added.
"Perhaps even more paradoxically, the US court declared that Grams couldn't be distributed not only in the United States, but globally. Why? Because, it said, 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," noted Durov.
