On May 12, Pavel Durov broke lots of blockchain hearts when he officially terminated the Telegram Open Network, along with its corresponding GRAM token.
As reported by Forbes Russia, majority of investors have chosen to opt for an immediate refund offered by Durov – at 72 cents on the dollar, rather than to loan their stake for additional 12 months in exchange for 110 cents on the dollar in April 2021. Disruptive Era Fund, which reportedly invested more than $70 million, added that apparently the majority of TON investors decided to choose this option.
According to Forbes’ data, overall, TON attracted $1,7 billion from 175 investors, including 39 coming from the US, who put $424,5 million to the project. Telegram has spent around $405 million on the network’s development, which is 24% of the sum raised during the ICO, according to the court documents.
Will the project being of open-source nature, and with the initial code being fully accessible to public and to developers’ community, will the TON project live? Well, an independent community of validators has already launched a TON-based platform called Free TON earlier this month, “flooded with support of developers from all over the world.”
TON’s destiny has raised a lot of questions about how global high-scale networks would operate – Libra, for instance. Tom Trowbridge, the president of Triterras and a former president of Hedera Hashgraph, evaluated the situation for NexChange:
The largest ICO by valuation, Telegram, gave up and is returning money to investors. A year ago that would have been very hard to imagine. Libra hadn’t even been announced at this time last year – and since its announcement, members left, members joined, and Libra changed their model substantially to focus on fiat linked stable coins.