Key Takeaways:
- Telegram-verified payments bot to accept Toncoin cryptocurrency.
- Durov’s comments came as Donate, a Telegram-verified payments service, was preparing to enable Toncoin cryptocurrency donations on Telegram.
- On Thursday, TON announced a partnership with Donate, stating that Toncoin will soon be used to make donations and pay for subscriptions.
After officially abandoning the project last year, Telegram co-founder and CEO Pavel Durov expressed excitement about the Telegram Open Network (TON) technology that is still being developed.
Durov said in a Telegram post on Thursday that,
“I’m proud that the technology we created is alive and evolving. When it comes to scalability and speed, TON is still years ahead of everything else in the blockchain realm. He noted that the project rebranded from TON to Toncoin. Unlike the original TON, the new project is independent of Telegram. But I wish its team the same success. Coupled with the right go-to-market strategy, they have all they need to build something epic.”
Durov’s comments came as Donate, a Telegram-verified payments service, was preparing to enable Toncoin cryptocurrency donations on Telegram. On Thursday, TON announced a partnership with Donate, stating that Toncoin will soon be used to make donations and pay for subscriptions. In addition, Channel administrators will be able to receive their earnings in cryptocurrency simultaneously. The Subscriptions service previously announced the news on Monday.
TON is a blockchain created by brothers Nikolai and Pavel Durov in 2017. Still, after a lengthy battle with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, the two brothers and Telegram walked away from the project in 2020. The SEC won a case accusing Telegram of breaking US securities laws when it conducted its $1.7 billion initial coin offering in 2018.
TON’s idea has not been abandoned, despite Telegram’s official project termination more than a year ago. On the contrary, the original open-source project has spawned several independent spinoffs. For example, the TON Russian community has nearly 160,000 subscribers on its official Telegram channel at the time of writing, while the global Toncoin community has around 50,000 followers.
