After Returning $1.2B to Investors, Telegram Open Network (TON) to End Testnet By August

The Telegram Open Network (TON) will be shut down in a months’ time after running close to a year. This leaves developers with an only option to run the network on their own node validators, Telegram stated in an announcement on their Telegram page on Tuesday.

This follows the recent shut down of Telegram’s involvement in any blockchain development and abandoning the $1.7 Billion ICO after the U.S Securities Commission (SEC) won a case against Telegram ruling the offering illegal.

The development group said they will be discontinuing any support of TON testnet validators “not later than 1^st August, 2020”. The statement further gives guidance on how users who wish to continue developing on the TON blockchain can migrate to personal TON validators.

Technical details on setting up a Full Node, becoming a validator and setting up a test GRAMs environment is also available.

TON open-sourced development

Despite Telegram losing its brainchild and blockchain project which saw the company pay an $18.5 million fine to the SEC and enter a 2-year probation period, the battle for TON development continues. In the latter days of March, BEG reported that the TON project developers were determined to keep the platform alive.

In May, a forked version of the Telegram open-sourced TON operating system surfaced on GitHub showing that the development of the platform was well alive despite Telegram’s exit. So far, the Ton Labs, a non-profit organization is independently working on the Free TON platform and is being challenged with other communities including New TON and a Chinese version of TON.