TON token delays may contribute to $1.7 billion in investments being returned

The crypto-ecosystem is ready to welcome the first 5th generation blockchain as Telegram Open Network (TON) nears its launch next month. While the highlighted features of the next-gen technology include dynamic sharding, “tight-coupling” for blockchain interoperability, and multichain networks, Binance’s latest report on TON suggests,

“If TON is not able to live up to its promise and issue the first TON tokens (i.e., Gram) by October 31st 2019, the capital raised (USD 1.7 bn) will be returned to investors.”

Binance Report also highlighted that Telegram has not disclosed any details pertaining to its developers, although the company is speculated to use its existing resources. As a result, the predicament “makes it difficult to judge their prior engagements and track records in cryptography and distributed systems.”

Source: Binance Research

According to the information made public by Telegram, the Telegram Open Network will support a virtual machine (i.e., Telegram Virtual Machine) that acts similar to Ethereum, allowing for distributed, “sandboxed” execution environments. Binance added,

“However, it is worth mentioning that a) TON intends to scale upon demand and will not attempt to start with millions of transactions and b) wants to have more use cases than financial transactions.”

The report also compares the TON initiative with Facebook’s Libra token, while highlighting their “very different approaches in their attempt to engage with a broader audience.” It is important to note that while the TON offering promises caliber given its direct similarities to Libra and Ethereum, some of the immediate challenges faced by the crypto are “a very unpopular and poorly documented programming language, a very small developer community and an overall new architecture, which is hard to understand for external parties.”