Durov on TON’s Growth

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The Russian tech entrepreneur also spoke about the Telegram Open Network (TON), the blockchain project Telegram developed in 2018–2019 but couldn’t launch due to US regulatory pressure.

He said Bitcoin and Ethereum “were not scalable enough to cope with the load that our hundreds of millions of users would create,” which led Telegram to develop TON’s “shardchains” for inherent scalability.

Now rebranded as The Open Network and developed independently, TON has become deeply embedded in the Telegram ecosystem. “TON has become, I think, the largest or the second largest blockchain in terms of daily NFT trading volumes,” Durov noted.

Toncoin, the network’s native token, hit an all-time high of $8.25 in mid-2024 but has since fallen more than 67%.