By
Temitope Olatunji
April 18th, 2024
An investor update from September pegged completion of the Telegram Open Network — the social media giant’s long-anticipated cryptocurrency project — at 70 percent.
As we already wrote, Telegram was conceived as an immutable messaging facility that runs on encrypted protocols to ensure a secure and tamper-proof exchange of communication. No one was surprised when such an advanced messaging app proclaimed its involvement in the cryptocurrency world.
However, it seems that things are not going exactly blissfully for Telegram. The most notable element of the report, which was leaked on LinkedIn and had not previously been publicly available, is that the virtual machine (similar in nature to the Ethereum Virtual Machine) required to execute smart contracts on the TON is all but ready to deploy.
Just for reminder, reports of Telegram’s second secret pre-ICO sale has finally turned to be true in March this year as the popular messaging app has managed to clock fundraising with a total of $1.7 billion as it was closing the second round of its pre-ICO sale.
Back in February, the company announced that it had raised a whopping $850 million in the first round itself making it as the largest fundraising via token sale till date. The latest filing notes that the existing fundraising of $850 million is in addition to the previous offering, thereby surpassing the company’s initial targets of $1.2 billion, now making a total of $1.7 billion.
Strict Regulations Prolonging the Whole Process
However, in May, this popular secure messaging app announced canceling its initial coin offering.
Some sources familiar with the matter believed that cancellation of the planned ICO can be a result of increasingly strict regulations that are proposed by such entities as the Securities and Exchange Commission, Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and others since the company initially began examining a possibility to launch its ICO. The regulatory environment has been seriously changed since January.
During May, the team introduced Telegram Passport, which is aimed at identifying Telegram users. Telegram will offer users a possibility to upload all the necessary documents to the messenger. It will be enough to do it only once, as then Telegram will be instantly transferring this data to its partner services, enabling users to use the latter via Telegram or on their main websites.
The Telegram Open Network is intended to be a competitor to Ethereum for the launch and execution of smart contracts and decentralized applications. This means that it will likely play host to yet more tokens, and the value of the token may well be influenced by future ICOs that use it as a base platform.
BitMEX CEO Arthur Hayes recently commented that the Telegram ICO tokens had yet to be listed on any secondary exchange and that he sees in the near-future of ICO tokens a “reckoning” — specifically in 2019.
Status of the Project
According to the report, some aspects of the network in addition to the TVM are complete, such as Overlay networks. The parts that were lagging as of September, having less than 50 percent of the work completed, were the important block manipulation library and validation software stack.
The project is still only 70% complete, according to the document but it’s still not possible to say how well the network will operate once it is live. However, it seems everything is going according to the plan. The component needed for the execution of its smart contracts TON Virtual Machine is, as they say, “fully implemented and internally tested” but there will likely be some modifications as it is connected to other aspects of the network’s tech.
Many aspects of the TON Network, the component of the project that is required to make transaction requests, is also near completion, according to the document.
The part that’s furthest away from completion is the software for block generation and validation. Its validator software, specifically, is only 10% complete.
As written, TON will host other cryptocurrency applications on its network similarly to Ethereum, a competitive smart contract protocol and the second-largest crypto by market capitalization. Through the token sale of its native crypto, called Grams, the firm raised $1.7 billion. Investors were slated to get their tokens as early as December of this year, but the company doesn’t expect to be listed on a major exchange until 2019.