Pavel Durov Proud Of TON Technology Now Developing Into Toncoin

TON last Thursday announced a partnership with Donate. (photo credit: pixabay)

JAKARTA - Telegram's founder and CEO, Pavel Durov, has expressed his excitement about the Telegram Open Network (TON) technology that is still developing after Telegram officially left the project last year.

“I am proud that the technology we created is still alive and well. In terms of scalability and speed, TON is still years ahead of everything else in the blockchain world,” Durov said in a Telegram post on Thursday, December 23 quoted by Cointelegraph.

He noted that the project was renamed from TON to Toncoin. Unlike the original TON, this new project does not rely on Telegram. "But I wish the team the same success. Coupled with the right go-to-market strategy, they have everything they need to build something epic," he said.

Durov's remarks come as Donate, Telegram's verified payment service, prepares to enable donations on Telegram using the cryptocurrency Toncoin.

TON last Thursday announced a partnership with Donate, saying that users will soon be able to make donations and pay for their subscriptions on Toncoin. At the same time, channel administrators will be able to collect their earnings in cryptocurrency. The Subscription Service previously announced the news on Monday, December 20.

TON is a blockchain created by two brothers, Nikolai and Pavel Durov, in 2017, but both and Telegram withdrew from the project in 2020 after a long battle with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission. The SEC specifically won a case in which it accused Telegram of violating US securities laws by conducting a $1.7 billion initial coin offering in 2018.

Although Telegram officially discontinued the project more than a year ago, the idea of TON has not been abandoned, with the original open source project giving rise to a number of independent spinoffs.

At the time of writing, the Russian TON community has nearly 160,000 subscribers on its official Telegram channel, while the global Toncoin community has around 50,000 followers.

Amid the latest news, the price of Toncoin has seen significant growth, surging more than 23% over the past 24 hours and trading at 2.93 US dollars at the time of writing, according to data from CoinGecko.

The all-time high TON token price was US$4.5 which was recorded on November 12th. The token is listed on some of the world's largest crypto exchanges, including OKEx, FTX, and EXMO.