Telegram, the encrypted messaging app, competes with Facebook by launching its blockchain platform TON.

The encrypted messaging app Telegram was launched in 2013 and has become a mainstream communication tool in the blockchain and cryptocurrency community, with over 200 million users. It is expected to launch the Telegram Open Network (TON) in the third quarter of 2019.

Telegram was co-founded by Russian entrepreneur Pavel Durov and his brother Nikolai (a renowned computer scientist). In 2018, due to regulatory concerns, TON did not conduct an ICO but still raised nearly $1.7 billion in two rounds of private funding, second only to EOS's $4 billion in history. The virtual currency issued by TON is called Gram.

On June 14, the Russian research institution ATON released a comprehensive research report on TON, including an overview of TON's blockchain platform, internal payment system, custodial decentralized applications (DApps), built-in wallet, and the token Gram.

Features of TON Project

The whitepaper of TON states that compared to Bitcoin and Ethereum, the platform has greater scalability, enabling it to compete with traditional payment giants Visa and Mastercard in transaction speed. The features of TON are as follows:

• Infinite Sharding Paradigm: To achieve high scalability, TON splits and merges side chains as needed to achieve optimal load balancing, reducing transaction time and costs.
• Instant Hypercube Routing: Defined as an "intelligent routing mechanism," it ensures that multiple chains can seamlessly and quickly process transactions even when the network expands to millions of chains in the future.
• Proof-of-Stake Approach: Utilizing a PoS mechanism, rewards are based on the amount of tokens held. The more tokens held, the higher the probability of obtaining the right to validate transactions. For more information on consensus mechanisms, click here.
• TON Storage: Distributed file storage similar to the torrent protocol, which will be a primary use case for DApps requiring large storage.
• TON Proxy: An anonymous system used to anonymize identities and create decentralized virtual private networks (VPNs).

Gram Supply and Price

The total supply of Gram tokens is initially around 5 billion, with a set inflation rate of 2%, meaning the supply will increase to 10 billion tokens within 35 years. The predicted supply from 2019 to 2028 is as follows:

Among these, 200 million Gram tokens are held by the development team and locked up for four years, while 500 million are allocated for ecosystem incentives, accounting for 4% and 10% of the total supply, respectively, as shown below:

Since Gram did not conduct an ICO, the exact price is unknown. The report indicates that during the second private sale, the average price of the token was around $1.33.

Although Gram has not been listed on any exchanges yet, the UK-based Xena Exchange has introduced XGRAM futures trading, with the delivery date set for the token launch or February 2020. The highest price reached was $8.463 on March 20, and the current price fluctuates in the range of $1.8 to $2.4.

Additionally, the cryptocurrency exchange Liquid recently announced that Gram will be listed on July 10. However, Liquid and Telegram do not have a partnership, and the tokens are provided by Gram Asia, based in Korea, which claims to be the largest holder of Asian Gram tokens. There has been no official response from Telegram regarding this event.

Regulatory Issues

Regulatory uncertainties are a concern as the definition of Gram remains unclear, making it difficult to predict how different countries will regulate the project in the future. Since 2018, there have been several instances where Telegram has faced government interventions in various countries.

In April 2018, due to co-founder Pavel's refusal to share the application's encryption keys with regulatory authorities, Telegram was blocked in Russia. Despite government efforts to block Telegram, it continues to operate in Russia with occasional interruptions due to internal VPN plugins. In October of the same year, the Iranian government intensified restrictions on Telegram, declaring that cooperation with Telegram would be considered a threat to national security and local economy.

Roadmap

In April 2019, Telegram launched a private beta test of TON for a select group of developers worldwide. Although specific results were not disclosed publicly, two anonymous testers noted that the blockchain demonstrated "extremely high transaction speeds."

In May 2019, a simplified stable version of TON was released. According to the new documents released on test.ton.org, the document includes the initial version of the client and related databases.

It is understood that Telegram plans for a full launch in the third quarter of 2019, but the exact date depends on the platform's testing progress.

Conclusion

TON's main competitive advantage lies in its approximately 250 million active users. Once the platform is ready, a large user base may be introduced to its ecosystem. The report also notes that the TON wallet will be integrated into both the Telegram mobile and desktop client.

While TON presents many high scalability ideas in its whitepaper, such as Instant Hypercube Routing and Infinite Sharding Paradigm, these proposals were previously discussed by Ethereum's founder Vitalik Buterin in a blog post in 2014 (which has since been abandoned).

It appears that TON has not encountered any difficulties during its development process. Although the team claims to have demonstrated "extremely high transaction speeds" in the test version, whether it can succeed in a challenging and unpredictable real-world environment remains unknown (TON's code is not open to the public). Source

• Telegram Officially Releases Client Version of TON Test Network
• Facebook or Telegram's Cryptocurrency Could Succeed

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