Five-month delay for TON launch

SEC is demanding to register the tokens as securities, while Telegram insists that the cryptocurrency is not a security.

TON, a blockchain project started by the Durov brothers, has run into unexpected complications due to disagreements with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The final launch of TON will likely be delayed by five months. The company’s legal department will try to negotiate a compromise with the Commission during this time. 

The delay has sparked another problem, as Pavel Durov had promised to return $1.7 billion worth of invested funds to investors if the TON system could not be launched by October 31, 2019. However, it appears that Telegram will file the complaints from the SEC under the ‘force majeure clause’. It also appears that investors are rather loyal to the project, as they can see great potential in it.

The people who have invested their funds into the project (171 investors from different countries) have received letters from the company offering a choice between waiting for a delayed launch in late April or getting 77% of their investments back. On October 23, the TON legal team will negotiate with the SEC to delay the negotiations on all misunderstandings. 

The legal team will also be tasked with ensuring that the SEC does not issue an official ban, even a temporary one, and trying to convince them to agree on a new launch date. Telegram believes that this decision will receive less backlash from the public. 

The company disagrees with several complaints from the commission, for instance, their demand to treat the Gram tokens as securities, which would require the company to disclose information on deals, additional information on the management of Gram and other information that the blockchain platform would rather not disclose.

The legal team has already spent a year and a half aligning on the details of the development of TON, sharing all the necessary documents with the SEC. Their current task is to buy more time, to make sure their efforts were not in vain.