What is known about the upcoming TON blockchain from Telegram?

Although the TON development team has just over a month left to finish work on theirblockchain platform, investors admit that they know no more about the project than everyone else, and developers testing the blockchain say that it lacks many important links.

On Tuesday in their official channel the teamTelegram announced an open competition for the development of smart contracts with a deadline of October 16, two weeks before the main deadline of TON itself. The winner is promised $200-400 thousand. Essentially, this means that the Durov team invited the community to help it develop one of the important elements of the future blockchain - smart contracts.

Competition is good news for futureTON users, said Denis Efremov, investment director of Da Vinci Capital. So far, there are not so many practical applications for the Durovs blockchain, and different smart contracts will give the community the necessary functionality.

“The smart contracts proposed for the competition are not a key element of TON, but one of the possible user applications”, - says Fedor Skuratov from TON Labs, an independent TON developer of services for the future Durov blockchain.

It is worth noting that the current situationworries investors. In this edition of The Bell, two people admitted who invested personal funds in the Durov project. One complained that the Telegram team did not provide investors with any information other than rare newsletters. Another said that ICO participants who have invested several tens of millions of dollars in the project do not receive any reports on the progress of the project.

He noticed:

“Not only are they not asked about anything, but they are not even notified. These people are not used to this kind of attitude.”

Such a major investor in the project as David Yakobashvili said:

“I get information mainly from the media. If necessary, you can always write a letter, they answer there. ”

Commenting on the news that the Telegram developers decided to attract third-party teams for a reward of $ 400 thousand, Yakobashvili said that this is more of a plus for the project.

“I know Nikolay Durov is a very pedantic person, and I am optimistic about the future of the project”- added Yakobashvili. According to the businessman, he recently met with several investors of the project, who generally share his mood.

Most of the information is from large investorsrecently received from third-party teams involved in the development of TON. At the beginning of September, the Telegram team made a test version of TON publicly available. The developers who are testing it, and people familiar with the progress of the project, say that Durov categorically did not want to make Telegram paid, promising that he would find and present his own monetization model, which the blockchain platform became.

At the time of the announcement of a new project at DurovThere were several tens of millions of dollars left, one of his acquaintances estimates. In total, at the end of 2013, according to various estimates, from the sale of his stake in VKontakte, Durov received from $ 300 to $ 480 million. In 2016, Forbes estimated the state of the entrepreneur at $ 600 million.

How much of the $ 1.7 billion raised duringICO, already spent on the blockchain - is unknown. But the core of the TON development is five people, including Nikolai Durov, says TON Labs spokesman Fedor Skuratov. In total, about 15 people work on the project, which is also quite small, confirms one of the friends of the Durovs. For comparison: in TON Labs, which independently develops services for the Durov blockchain, there are 55 programmers.

A small team is one of the main reasonswhich Telegram does not undertake to develop on the basis of its blockchain services for end users. But this is beneficial for everyone, insiders believe: Durov and his team will not complete the entire project, the new services will help TON become more widespread, and the Gram currency (most of the tokens from the Durovs and Kefirrup investors themselves) will increase in price in the future.

The technology for determining the rate was written in the whitepaper of the project: each new Gram token will be one billionth more expensive than the previous one.

“According to the whitepaper, TON Reserve has 2.5 billion GRM at its disposal, which will also be used to stabilize the exchange rate if it grows too fast.”- said Skuratov.

In the first round, ICO Gram sold for $ 0.5, inthe second - at $ 1.2- $ 1.7. The price after the launch can be any, but it is likely that the corridor at the start of sales will be approximately $ 2.5- $ 3, insiders suggest. Aton Investment Company estimated the future launch of Gram at $ 2.1– $ 8.0 per token. According to analysts, the market capitalization of Gram by the end of 2028 will reach $ 68 billion– $ 135 billion, and the cost of one token will increase to $ 15-30.

Closer to launch, crypto-exchanges will appear on whichGram will contact: large sites are already negotiating with investors Durov. One of such exchanges could be Blackmoon registered in the Cayman Islands, owned by Ilya Perekopsky, Vice President of Telegram Business Development and Oleg Seydak, co-founder of Flint Capital venture fund. Another such exchange could be the British DSX, one of the investors said: it is also negotiating a listing with a large number of large investors.

Investors participating in the ICO will receive a Gram on theirwallets, and with their help they can become the so-called validators - confirm transactions and receive rewards for this. To qualify for the right to validate transactions, you need to have 100 thousand Grams: they are pledged, and the decision is made by a sort of lottery, the winners of which are higher for holders of a larger number of Grams.

In addition to large investors who can personallymaking money on transactions in the blockchain, there will be a lot of pools, Skuratov believes: users will join in groups to collect a deposit for the lottery together, and then they will share the profit.

If everything goes according to plan, by October 31st there will bea complete version of the blockchain has been launched, but it is not clear whether ordinary users can test TON at this time. “It all depends on whether TON developers will integrate their wallet for transfers into Telegram right away, or do it later,” Skuratov explained, “no one knows, because they don’t have to do this: such a function is generally stated, but it’s is not a prerequisite for launching until October 31st. ”

Most likely, by the end of October, mostTelegram users will not replace any changes. All applications, including the transfer of cryptocurrencies, are unlikely to be tested this year, all developers agree.

Judging by the test version of TON, which the teamTelegram has made it publicly available, the blockchain will be written almost completely from scratch and will almost never use borrowed solutions. Development from scratch was necessary to solve all the problems stated in whitepaper of previous blockchains.

TON, as conceived by the creators, was supposed to bemuch faster, cheaper, easier to scale and be safer than their counterparts - to achieve this, you had to take the best existing solutions and remake everything in your own way, says Skuratov. He believes that the developers succeeded: at least from what is now known, the Durovs blockchain will be much faster than its counterparts, such as bitcoin, and will not multiply in price when scaling (this is one of the main problems of ethereum). Thanks to this, TON may be able to create its own decentralized Internet - something that other blockchains could not do.

Now with TON several largedevelopment teams not affiliated with the Durov team. The largest of them is TON Labs, created by the founder of the investment companies Genesis Holding and SP Capital Alexander Filatov and his partners. In addition to developers working directly with TON documentation, there are a number of companies that are already starting to launch commercial projects on the blockchain - for example, ButtonWallet wallet, which now allows you to translate test Grams. About 70% of all developers and companies that are currently doing something around TON are from Russia or with Russian roots.

Investors are not only concerned about the readiness of TON, but alsothe determination of the Russian authorities to continue the fight against Telegram. Roskomnadzor promises to introduce new Telegram blocking options, and from November 1, the law on "sovereign runet" comes into force. In addition, it is still unclear how financial regulators from different countries relate to the Durov project.

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