The SEC stopped Telegram’s ambitions to launch TON. But the project never died, and now it is ready to be used and traded in OKX and via an in-app bot.
On April 26, the TON Foundation announced a new bot that enables cryptocurrency transactions using The Open Network’s token TON inside the Telegram app.
This new feature will benefit the more than 550 million users using Telegram, who will be able to send and receive TON without zero fees benefiting from the blockchain once envisioned by Telegram.
The feature launched on April 28, the day TON will be available for purchase on OKX, a Malta-based cryptocurrency exchange previously know as OKEx.
Toncoin’s ticker has been changed to TON on @okx
The exchange will begin accepting deposits on April 28, starting at 3:00 am UTC, and spot trading will resume at 5:00 UTC.$TON withdrawals will be open starting April 29 at 9:00 am UTC.
Will Toncoin Live Up To The Community’s Expectations?
With this new feature, Telegram has the potential to compete against other social media platforms such as Twitter, which since last year has been supporting tips in Bitcoin and Ethereum and recently partnered with Stripe to add payment features via the Coinbase-created stablecoin, USD Coin (USDC).
Other social media sites with similar approaches are Reddit and even Whatsapp, with its fiat-powered Whatsapp Pay feature available in Brazil and India.
According to the Foundation, the goal of this new feature is for users to be able to make transactions as easy as sending a text message, avoiding the complications associated with managing a crypto wallet and the lengthy non-human-readable crypto addresses.
Also, according to a statement shared with Coindesk, the TON Foundation expects to see this payment method used by consumers to purchase goods and services from different companies.
“We anticipate that this functionality will extend into consumer to business payments, so that people can easily acquire goods and services by sending toncoin via bots in the Telegram app,”
Telegram abandoned Toncoin, But The Community Kept it Alive.
In 2020, Telegram had to abandon the original TON project due to a lawsuit issued by the SEC, which at the time was on an anti-ICO spree, going after major players like Ripple, Facebook, KIK, and Telegram along with other huge scams like Bitconnect and Onecoin.
Currently, the TON project is independent of Telegram, so according to Pavel Durov, CEO and founder of Telegram, the new team in charge of the project is building “something epic” that manages to keep the platform among the top of social networks, competing with Elon Musk’s “new Twitter,” of which no one knows for sure what functionalities will offer in the future.
So although Pavel Durov believes that TON is “years ahead” of its competitors, This new cryptocurrency will have a lot of work to prove its worth now that the ecosystem has grown and matured.