Cryptocurrency TON from Telegram: still only rumors

Rumors about the launch of the Pavel Durov's company the cryptocurrency based on the Telegram messenger began to appear in early December. On December 21, a message appeared on Facebook of Anton Rosenberg, a former employee of Vkontakte and Telegram that the messenger team plans to start an ICO project called TON (Telegram Open Network) and release its own cryptocurrency Gram, which will be built into the messenger. At the same time, there was an ad on YouTube, though it did not reveal any specific details.

 All this information is based on allegedly "leaked" information from within the team, but neither Telegram nor Pavel Durov himself gave any official comments on whether work is under way on a new cryptocurrency and whether the ICO will be started. Durov confined himself that Telegram publishes all official announcements only on its website. However, on the site no announcements about the creation of the cryptocurrency have appeared.

Now, nothing is known about the project. According to the same "leaked" information, most of which is set forth in the Techcrunch article on January 8, TON will become the so-called "blockchain 3.0" (however, this concept exists only among marketers and is not technically regulated), and soon after the launch, it will be "pushed" Ethereum and Bitcoin, not to mention other cryptocurrencies. In total, ICO plans to receive $ 3-5 billion, with the company and developers retaining up to 56% of tokens, and only 44% will go on sale.

According to various sources, ICO Telegram will start in March 2018, and now it is presumably being held among large investors. One of them was named Mail.ru Group, but the company denied these reports.

Pavel Durov himself and other activists warn the community that fraudulent sites, mailings and even Telegram channels have already appeared that are posing as the official ICO team and, of course, offer to buy tokens from them before the official launch of the ICO.

The minimum work product (MVP) TON should appear in the second quarter of this year, and a stable version will be released only by the end of the year. User services and the "economy of tokens" will unfold as early as 2019.

The Russian authorities reacted to the launch of such a large-scale ICO quite indifferently.

"He will let go, and God bless him," - told reporters on January 11 Alexei Moiseev, Deputy Minister of Finance of the Russian Federation.

At the moment, a month after the appearance of the first "insider" messages, no officially confirmed information about the TON project has ever appeared. However, since the company does not refute numerous articles in the media - therefore, there is a fair amount of truth in them, although the details may differ significantly from those published. Those who wish to participate in ICO Telegram should be extremely cautious and wait for the verified official statements of the developers, as in the past year there are already known cases of the success of scammers who have stolen millions of dollars with the help of fraudulent sites that imitate the present ICO.