No.022
Toncoin TON
the project a court shut down, then fans brought back
๐ญ a payment coin that a U.S. regulator switched off in 2020; volunteers restarted it, and now it lives inside Telegram chats
๐ฌ โA judge once told me to stop. So I stopped. Then a few thousand people I'd never met decided I shouldn't stay stopped. Now? Tap a chat, send money. Try it.โ
- The idea: send money inside a chat, as easily as a sticker. The app is Telegram.
- U.S. regulators forced Telegram to drop the project in 2020. Volunteers restarted it and renamed it The Open Network.
- Telegram has hundreds of millions of users, so the wallet has a very big front door.
๐ The Story
The story really starts with a shutdown. In October 2019, a U.S. court froze the launch of a coin called โGramโ, and the messenger behind it, Telegram, had to call everything off. Back in 2018 the company had sold this coin to investors and raised roughly $1.7 billion for it. The plan sounded almost too easy: open a chat, tap a button, send money the way you'd send a sticker.
Regulators didn't see a chat feature. They saw an unregistered sale of an investment, and they said so. The fight dragged into 2020 until Telegram gave up, agreed to hand back about $1.2 billion to investors, and paid an $18.5 million penalty on top. That's usually where a project ends. A failed coin, a tidy court filing, the end.
Except a group of outside developers didn't want to let it go. They had no company and no marketing budget, only the open-source code Telegram had left behind. They picked it up, renamed it The Open Network (Toncoin), and kept building. The bet paid off slowly, then suddenly: in 2024, simple tap-to-earn games inside Telegram pulled in waves of newcomers, many of them touching crypto for the first time. Whether that counts as redemption or just a second roll of the dice is, honestly, still an open question.
๐ Stats
๐งฉ How it works
Say you're chatting with a friend and you owe them lunch money. You don't switch apps. You open the TON wallet right inside Telegram, pick โsendโ the way you'd pick a sticker, and that's it. In between, validators (computers around the world that check and confirm transactions) do the work, and about the time it takes to sip some water, your friend's chat goes โdingโ with the money in it. It's quick, and the fee to send is barely a coin.
๐ Light & Shadow
- It's built into one of the world's biggest messengers, so the wallet is already where people chat
- You never leave the conversation. Sending money is just another thing you do in the chat window
- Transfers land in seconds, and the fee to send is tiny
- That big front door is also a single point of failure. If Telegram stumbles, so does TON (relying on one thing this much is called โdependenceโ)
- The 2020 case with U.S. regulators was settled, but the memory of it still colors how some people view the project
- Like most crypto, the price can jump or drop sharply
๐งญ Meet other friends
โ FAQ
- What's its relationship with Telegram?
- The messenger Telegram first created it, then stepped away in 2020. A community picked it up and revived it, and it is still used mainly inside the Telegram app today.
- I heard it failed once?
- It's true that in 2020 Telegram halted the project after a dispute with U.S. regulators. But afterward a community took it over and revived it under the name 'The Open Network'.
- Where can I buy it?
- On most cryptocurrency exchanges. (Information only, not a recommendation to use any specific exchange or to invest.)
โ ๏ธ Not investment advice. All figures are for information only.