About

The Open Network (TON) is a decentralized blockchain platform designed for scalability, high transaction throughput, and secure application hosting. It supports decentralized applications and serves as a distributed infrastructure for various digital services.

History

The TON project began as the Telegram Open Network, introduced by Telegram Messenger Co-Founders Pavel Durov and Nikolai Durov in 2018. The duo aimed to raise funding to support Telegram Messenger’s servers and pay for related services.

To fund the project's development, Telegram raised $1.7 billion from the sale of TON’s native token (then called GRAM) in February 2018. It would eventually release the TON virtual machine (TVM) in December 2018 and two testnets in 2019. However, in October 2019, the SEC filed a complaint against Telegram Group Inc. The 2020 settlement of the litigation mandated Telegram to repay 70% ($1.2 billion) of the funds raised to its investors, in addition to paying an $18.5 million penalty. Telegram subsequently ended the project, open-sourcing its codebase on GitHub.

While Telegram could not continue TON’s development, the published whitepaper and open-sourced code allowed other groups to do so. Subsequently, three separate and independent TON-inspired projects were formed - Free TON, New TON, and TON Community Blockchain. The Free TON and New TON projects remain the most prominent of the three to date, with both consistently competing for the brand identity of the original TON blockchain project. Free TON eventually rebranded to Everscale in December 2021, while New TON acquired rights to the original GitHub codebase of the TON blockchain from Telegram.

Source: History and Roadmap

Initially founded in May 2020 by a team of two - Anatoliy Makosov and EmelyanenkoK, New TON has evolved into a team of 40-plus open-source community developers named the TON Foundation. In May 2021, the New TON community renamed the original TON testnet v2, released by Telegram in 2019, as The Open Network (TON) Mainnet. The TON Foundation has maintained and developed the original TON codebase as an independent community blockchain project ever since. The Open Network aims to create a fully decentralized internet.

Source: TON Primer

In September 2023, TON Foundation launched as a Swiss non-profit organization to “[add] an extra layer of credibility and accountability.” The same month, the TON Foundation announced that TON would be available on Telegram’s self-custodial wallet.