With the endorsement of its founder, Pavel Durov, CEO of Telegram, the hugely ambitious TON blockchain is planning big things for 2022.
In a recent Telegram post, Durov, who founded TON about five years ago, said the project was “alive and evolving.” He continued that speed and scalability are still “years ahead of everything else” in the blockchain industry.
Durov’s continued support for the project is surprising, given that he left TON after a legal challenge by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission less than two years ago. Telegram launched the initiative in 2017 and enjoyed great success in its early stages, generating over $1.6 billion in ICOs for the initial cryptocurrency platform “GRAM” token and receiving high praise from the community.
Unfortunately for Durov, progress stalled in 2019 when it was revealed that the SEC was halting its token sales after GRAM was classified as an “unregistered security.” A protracted legal battle ensued, with the SEC, unsurprisingly, emerging victorious. Telegram eventually promised to return the $1.2 billion raised to ICO investors before abandoning the project altogether.
While this may have signaled TON’s demise, Durov sowed the seeds for its current incarnation by opening up all the work he had done on blockchain development. His plans were quickly taken over by a group of programmers led by the Russian Anatoly Makosov, who has been secretly planning to return ever since.
Believers in the project will be relieved to see that TON, led by Makosov, has not abandoned its original goals. The enthusiasm of the new project team can rival that of Durov, and they have drawn up an extremely ambitious roadmap that requires all critical elements of the project to be operational by the end of the year.
TON blockchain has been active since last year, and by the end of the first quarter, the company plans to launch its DNS service, which will enable intelligent contracts and human–readable account names. Other Q1 milestones include the simultaneous launch of the first Defi applications, proxy servers, and the new TON developer program.
After that, there are just two things left: your decentralized file storage system and TON
Workchains, which will connect you to all the other blockchains on the planet. Last year, the company made significant progress toward the latter goal, establishing a TON–ETH bridge that allows Tocoins to be sent and received between it and the Ethereum network.
Since TON hopes its blockchain will eventually become the cornerstone of the new web3, a decentralized version of the public internet in which people have full control over their data and complete anonymity, such a roadmap is needed. It will have to combine all the existing blockchains into a single decentralized network and enable super–fast transactions and low fees if it so chooses.
The TON project has set ambitious goals, but it can’t be accused of doubting its ability to achieve them. It has been boasting in Telegram lately that 2022 will be the year it finally reaches “mass adoption,” which everyone has dodged—a project to date.
While much of the crypto world is likely to reject statements like halabuku, few can deny that 2022 will be a landmark for one of the most ambitious blockchain projects ever contemplated.
This content is for informational purposes only. It is not presented as legal, financial, investment, tax, or other advice and is not intended for use.
