According to an email sent to all the investors, Telegram Open Network (TON) is right on track for its late October launch.
Recently, there were reports that CTO of TON Labs, Mitja Goroshevsky confirmed the genuineness of the email. TON Labs is the startup behind the building tools for TON developers. Reportedly, the code for TON was out in early September, permitting the community members to test full nodes, validator nodes, and a block explorer.
In a channel of the Telegram completely dedicated to TON, the company posted that “Original investors received emails from the Telegram core team,” asking them to give Telegram their public keys by October 16, which they can generate using the key generator, so that they can receive the ‘Grams’ bought.
Telegram has announced the launch of its virtual currency, Gram this October. It is planning to release these coins in two batches in the coming two months. Telegram aims to make Gram Digital Wallet available to about 200-300 million users of the messaging app worldwide. Gram is not backed by any fiat currency and its value will be decided based on the demand and supply of the tokens.
Telegram decided to undertake its ambitious project in the crypto market under complete secrecy after a similar project of Facebook faced a lot of hurdles from regulators. In fact, Facebook’s Libra had to delay its launch due to this reason. Therefore, Telegram is silently working on its TON project and the release of its cryptocurrency, so that it can be launched right on time, or else the company risks losing about $1.7 billion, the entire fund that was raised for this venture in early 2018. Telegram never publicly announced or gave away any information about TON publicly. The only formal confirmation till now has been its registration of SAFT (simple agreement for future tokens) with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which features the names of Telegram Group’s CEOs and TON’s chief architect, Pavel Durov and Nikolai Durov.