TELEGRAM’S $1.7 BILLION CRYPTOCURRENCY IS 70% COMPLETE: REPORT

(ccn)

An investor update from September pegged completion of the Telegram Open Network — the social media giant’s long-anticipated cryptocurrency project — at 70 percent. Perhaps 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. The news was first reported by The Block.

Telegram, the Russian secure messaging service that sees global usage, including within the crypto community, raised $1.7 billion in its private ICO sale. 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.