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June 2019 www.intellinews.com I Page 3
the installation of 150,000 cameras with face recognition capacity at the airports and train stations and on the metro system in Moscow
Russia’s TON blockchain in testing phase
Telegram founder Pavel Durov raised $1.7bn last March with one of the most successful ICO (Initial Coin Offerings) of all time and has used part of the proceeds to develop TON, which is intended to create a universal blockchain infrastructure based on its speed operation and its inclusion of “smart contracts” – pieces of code that can be tasked to carry out functions such as make payments or send reports.
On May 25, a user of the computer code repository GitHub reportedly uploaded a version of the client, TON Blockchain Network Lite Client, which, if configured properly, could be connected to the TON blockchain's test net.
No official comments have come from TON,
but the news could be viewed as more proof that testing the network is in full swing,
also confirming earlier reports that the TON blockchain has been open for beta testing to a limited number of global developers since April.
Apart from the client, which facilitate creation of new smart contracts, testing the existing ones and sending messages, and the blockchain, the TON ecosystem will include Fift, a programming language designed for developing and managing smart contracts on the TON blockchain and interaction with the TON Virtual Machine.
TON Virtual Machine, which will execute smart contracts on the TON blockchain, supports
all operations requiring analysing incoming messages and modifying the data base.
and St Petersburg. Incidentally, NtechLab is also reportedly involved in the project, but its timeframe is not yet known.
While few specifics regarding TON have been revealed so far, anonymous testers have been pointing to the blockchain's "extremely high" transaction speed.
Telegram was launched by Durov, the founder and former owner of Vkontakte, the Russian answer to Facebook, and his brother Nikolai in 2013. But the instant encrypted messaging service gained popularity over the last couple of years as it demonstrated higher security and reliability than competing services.
The service’s encryption has proven to be so secure that the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) demanded the encryption key to the service earlier this year – a request that Durov denied. The au- thorities then tried to close the Telegram service down in what turned into a fiasco. In the meantime Telegram’s usership has only increased to 3.7mn in Russia in July and includes many government em- ployees amongst its users who don't want to reveal their communications to the FSB.
The first reports that Telegram may launch a block- chain and issue a token, called “Gram,” arrived in late 2017, at the peak of the crypto/blockchain hype.
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