#Telegram

On June 18th, Russia’s internet and media watchdog Roskomnadzor posted a short notice saying that Telegram messenger is no longer subject to blocking in the Russian Federation. The ban that lasted for two years and has been lifted because the messenger executives agreed to cooperate with the authorities in fighting terrorism and extremism.

A 900-megabyte database of Telegram users’ phone numbers, nicknames, and unique identifiers has been found posted on one of the forums on the dark web. The exact number of affected accounts isn’t known but estimated to be in the millions.

While it lasted, Telegram’s TON project has been a tempting target for investors. A few managed to get into TON’s private token sale while the rest had to wait till launch or look for futures contracts for Gram tokens, which were offered by several trading platforms.

A group of 30 independent developers launched the test network for NewTON Blockchain, one of the projects aiming to continue the cause of Telegram’s TON project after the conflict with the SEC. One of the developers behind NewTON, Anatoly, shared some details about the project with ForkLog.

Telegram Open Network developers have rolled out a few final updates to the source code and will no longer actively participate in the project. The announcements came on May 24th via TON’s test portal page.

Russian-born entrepreneur and programmer Pavel Durov, who is most famous for the creation of the encrypted chat app Telegram, has been under scrutiny of the United States financial regulators since 2019. That year, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) turned its attention to Telegram and its wholly-owned subsidiary, TON Issuer.

TON developers, major PoS validators, and community enthusiasts have announced the launch of Free TON powered by the native token TON Crystal in a declaration.

On April 3rd, 2020, class-action suits against four major crypto-exchanges and seven ICO projects were filed. The lawsuits allege that the defendants have violated U.S. securities laws.

In 2018, Telegram raised $1.7 billion through an ICO in exchange for the future delivery of 2.9 billion Gram tokens to 175 investors. While Grams could realistically be sold with a premium on the secondary market, Telegram argued that the agreement was in line with the definition of a private placement of securities that is […]

March 24, the New York Southern District Court has preliminarily halted the transfer of Gram tokens to the primary investors of TON. Thus, the court ruled in favor of the U.S. SEC and recognized Gram non-registered security.

Roskomnadzor is closely studying anonymous and decentralized networks that enable bypassing the blocks imposed by the department. The ultimate goal of this study is to restrict access to such networks at the legislative level.

Some people in the crypto-community expect mass adoption to come with big players from traditional markets. Some see it coming along the growing set of real use cases for crypto, certain regulatory initiatives, or particularly ambitious projects.