Page 28 - BNE_magazine_06_2020 Growers

28 I Companies & Markets bne June 2020
bne:Tech
Russian internet guru Pavel Durov cancels the TON blockchain project
Ben Aris in Berlin
Internet guru and owner of the Telegram message service Pavel Durov has halted his TON block chain project and may have to return the $1.7bn he raised in the largest ever ICO to fund the project.
“Today is a sad day for us here at Telegram. We are announcing the discontinuation of our blockchain project. Below is
a summary of what it was and why we had to abandon it,” Durov announced on his Telegram channel.
The much-hyped project was to create a state-of-the-art blockchain with the associated Gram coin that was to become a platform for commercialising blockchain. Despite all the hype surrounding blockchain there has yet to be a single widely used commercial application of the technology, partly due to the difficulties related to the lack of a widely used and accessible platform.
“For the last two and a half years some of our best engineers have been working on a next-generation blockchain platform called TON and a cryptocurrency we were going to name Gram. TON was designed to share the principles of decentralisation pioneered by Bitcoin and Ethereum, but to be vastly superior to them in speed and scalability,” Durov said in a statement following the announcement.
As bne IntelliNews reported last week, the TON project was already in trouble after it missed yet another deadline to launch the blockchain.
Telegram raised $1.7bn from 171 investment funds and wealthy individuals with an ICO in early 2018, including 39 US investors. Under the initial plan, TON was scheduled for
“The project had a further setback when the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) launched a lawsuit against Telegram in October 2019”
release in the second quarter of 2018, but was then delayed to 2019. But the project had a further setback when the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) launched a lawsuit against Telegram in October 2019, after which Durov set a new deadline of April this year. That too was missed.
Hostile to the launch of the Gram cryptocurrency, the US regulator sees in the 2018 ICO an unregistered securities sale. In March 2020, a US judge ruled that Telegram cannot launch its blockchain or issue the Gram tokens until the case has been resolved.
Durov blamed the US court decision for halting the project. His statement was accompanied with a graphic bearing the word “banned” in red letters. He wrote scathingly of the US court decision: “Unfortunately, a US court stopped TON from happening. 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. Then a judge comes and tells the mine builders: "Many 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, you are not allowed to give them the gold." If this doesn't make sense to you, you are not alone – but this is exactly what
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