The TON Community Foundation, which is made up of several dozen developers and investors, is exploring the possibility of launching the Telegram Open Network (TON) without the participation of Telegram, CoinDesk reports. However, Fedor Skuratov, founder of the organization, said the final decision still must be made.
He says all the necessary code to launch TON is already available, so the only thing left is to generate the genesis block/the first batch of transactions and connect at least 13 validators. Skuratov has added:
"Strictly speaking, no additional measures are required to launch TON by the community, except for a consensus within the community. But in order to get recognized, we will need to come to an agreement with investors (at least, with a majority of them)."
In fact, TON Labs has already launched its own parallel testnet. Telegram released the code to launch nodes back in September last year and gradually introduced new elements even after starting its legal battle with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
According to Skuratov, it is still being discussed what to do with the tokens that should be distributed among investors and validators after the network goes live.
In order to validate transactions, validators must hold a minimum amount of Gram tokens, which is the reason why a certain number of tokens must be distributed before the launch.
According to the agreements that were signed in October, even though investors will only receive 72% of their funds if TON is not launched, their investment will still be a good deal if we take into consideration the current market situation.
Yesterday it was known a court in the Southern District of New York has prohibited the distribution of Gram tokens to investors, confirming the SEC's position that Gram is an unregistered security.
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