Telegram, one of the world’s leading social platforms and messaging apps, announced its TON (Telegram Open Network) blockchain project back in 2018. Now, however, the company is ready to release the needed code to run a TON node at the start of next month, on September 1st, as reported by a prominent specialized crypto news site this week.
The site quoted people familiaried with the situation in its report, and one of them is actually directly associated with TON Labs, which is the tech startup that the token sale investors of Telegram created.
The platform had not published too much information about TON, managing it discreetly instead. No public announcements have been made at the moment of writing this article by the influential social app.
TON Labs: the Voice of the Project
TON Labs, a venture that was founded with the intention of building developer tools for Telegram, has been a little more vocal about the project than Telegram itself, becoming one of the few, if not the only, voice associated with the ambitious project. People at TON Labs have reportedly kept in constant touch with Telegram’s development team.
Up to this day, the TON test network has only had one operational node, and it is run by Telegram. However, with the code release scheduled for September 1st, a larger pool of users will have the ability to run their own nodes.
One important thing to note, though: users can only run nodes on testnet, and the mainnet launch is currently expected to materialize on October 31st, per the Telegram’s token sale purchase agreement, published last year.
More details came to prominence thanks to Russian news site Vedomosty. According to a report from a mid-week report, the release will contain code for the node itself, but also instructions to deploy one.
Vedomosty quoted investors that preferred to stay anonymous in its report. It also stated that developers that are interested will have the opportunity to use their nodes as a mean to test the protocol’s consensus and sharding resources.
Technical Details
Per a whitepaper that was leaked to the web, the TON will implement a Byzantine -fault-tolerant proof-of-stake consensus with “infinite sharding.” Additionally, it will be able to support an impressive 292 shardchains (49 followed by 26 zeros).
Russian and American investors contributed loads of money to Telegram, with a minimum of $1.7 billion between the two countries and several others that invested to a lesser degree in the token sale held in 2018.
In the event that the network is not launched by October 31st, Telegram will reimburse its investors per the agreement, without any expenses that are development-related.
The crypto industry as well as investors remain very interested and engaged in Telegram’s blockchain project, and are eagerly waiting for it to materialize. The original launch date was actually December 2018, but several unexpected delays have made sure that was not the case.
Because of the delay, numerous investors sold the rights to their future GRAM tokens, the digital currency associated with the project, and this caused that a secondary market was formed. It is a violation of the investor agreement of Telegram, though.
By Andres Chavez
