Pavel Durov, the guy who brought us Telegram and TON, just got himself into some serious trouble. He was picked up by the cops at Bourget airport, right outside Paris, on a Saturday evening.
The whole thing is about Telegram not having enough moderators, which the police think is letting some shady stuff slide on the app. Yep, apparently, bad actors have been having a field day, and now Pavel is caught in the middle of this mess.
TON released a statement saying they’re still “strong and fully operational.” They made it clear that they’re all about “freedom of speech and decentralization,” and they’re not planning on slowing down just because Pavel’s in custody. They added that:
“The TON community remains focused on our mission, and we will continue our work to uphold these principles globally. We encourage everyone to stay calm, united, and to keep building as we navigate this situation together. Thank you for your continued support.”
TON, or Telegram Open Network, has been in the works since 2017. Back then, Pavel and his team at Telegram decided to dive into the blockchain game and create their own layer-1 blockchain.
But as with any good drama, there were obstacles. In January 2018, Pavel announced they were launching Gram, a new cryptocurrency, along with the TON platform.
Things were looking up until the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) decided to step in. They weren’t too happy with how things were going, claiming that the Gram tokens bypassed U.S. financial laws. It became a whole legal showdown.
By May 2020, under the weight of all the legal pressure, Pavel had to pull Telegram out of the TON project. They settled with the SEC the next month, which wasn’t exactly a win for Pavel’s vision of a decentralized network.
After Telegram stepped back, you’d think the project would just die out. But nope, a group of open-source developers took up the mantle and kept things moving under the name “NewTON.”
They stuck to the original ideas laid out in the TON whitepaper, which is basically the blueprint for what they wanted to build.
The whole point of TON was to make a high-performance blockchain that could handle a lot of traffic. We’re talking millions of transactions every second.
Telegram’s massive user base of over 930 million monthly users was supposed to give TON a big advantage. The plan remains making it easy for all these users to get into crypto without even leaving the app.
