Durov will launch cryptocurrency for everyone in March

Pavel Durov, photo from his Instagram

Pavel Durov is preparing to present his new product, under which a year ago Telegram attracted $ 1.7 billion from investors. The meeting with the largest investors should take place within a month, the sources of The Bell, familiar with the plans of the founders. And the main network of Mainnet is promised to launch in March.

Durov’s team announced to investors that the Ton project should be ready to launch at the beginning of the year, but delays for 2-3 months are possible due to the “innovative nature of development”.

Read more. Within a month, a meeting of the largest investors of the project should take place, at which the team will present how the Ton blockchain platform works and the first examples of its work in Telegram, a source familiar with the plans of the founders told The Bell. Another interlocutor, who communicated with the developers of the new platform, confirmed that, according to their data, Durov should show investors a test version of Ton in the near future.

In addition, The Bell studied the last newsletter, which was sent to the investors of the new platform (the document provided the @TGRAM channel, staring at the Ton news; the authors of the channel received it in early January). The document refers to the latest changes in the roadmap for the development of TON and GRAM cryptocurrency:

The team working on Ton is ready for the full launch in early 2019, although there is a small delay of 2-3 months due to the "innovative nature of development".
Ton is ready by about 90%, and fresh news about the platform will appear in February 2019. In the September newsletter, which Vedomosti wrote about, it was said that the platform was ready by 70%, and the test version of Ton will be launched “later this fall” (obviously, the deadlines moved).
Testnet test network will be opened in January (according to @tgram, received from one of the investors, Testnet is already open).
In February, Testnet audit is planned to search for errors and flaws.
The working version of the platform (Mainnet) will be open and presented to the public in March 2019, the newsletter says.

The Bell's request Pavel Durov and Ilya Perekop, who is responsible for the development of the Telegram business, did not answer.

On January 17, Durov sent a message that stated that "2018 was a wonderful year for Telegram, but 2019 will be the most important year in the history of our company." He promised to “introduce many long-awaited changes in the product”, which users asked for, and finally emphasized that “2019 will become time when the wishes of our users related to the functions [Telegram]”.

What else became known. The Ton team studies legal issues in more than 10 jurisdictions, preparing the system for worldwide expansion. Ton Issuer Inc. Actively works with crypto -streaks in Japan, China and Great Britain. Trading, most likely, will begin in Asia, and Japan may be the first country where Gram walks.

Context. The timing of the launch of the new blockchain platform has been postponed more than once. Initially, the launch of a test network for TON was planned for the second quarter of 2018. By the end of 2018, it was supposed to launch a stable platform and a Telegram Wallet wallet.

The history of the issue. During the pre -sale of Telegram tokens, at the beginning of last year, he received $ 1.7 billion. In total, more than 100 investors were believed in Ton. Among them, the media called Yuri Milner and Roman Abramovich, as well as the largest Silicon Valley funds Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Benchmark and Sequoia Capital, which, according to FT, were going to invest in the project of $ 20 million. The key feature The blockchain platform will not be launched until October 31, 2019, investors will receive money back.

Investors of the Telegram blockchain project, co-founder of VIMM-Bill-Danna David Yakobashvili and QIWI founder Sergei Solonin, who invested $ 10 million and $ 7 million in the first round, accordingly, said that they had no news about TON. Jacobashvili, heading for the economic forum in Davos, expressed the hope that Durov would meet there. One Bell's interlocutors said that he will be most likely to go there without registration as a participant. The list of forum guests (The Bell has) Durov was not declared.

Alexander Ambzin, Irina Pankratova, Irina Malkova