We will talk about what preceded the appearance of Free TON, and also why you should pay attention to this project and support it in its development.
So, let’s start a story about a project that showed all humanity that nothing can stop the development and the battle for human freedom. On December 21, 2017, Pavel Durov, who created projects such as VK and Telegram, announced the development of a TON project. The fight for a free Internet and user privacy has begun all over the world. In 2018, the project received $ 1.7 billion funding from investors. For a long time, the project has been actively developed by the most brilliant minds of our time in programming. But in 2019 the SEC comes into game. Due to the SEC order, the launch of the TON blockchain has been postponed until April 30, 2020. And on May 12, Pavel Durov officially announced that the project was stopped.
How did it all start?
Telegram, as well known, was created to allow anyone in the world the possibility to safely and confidential communication. In 2015, Pavel Durov said that the Telegram team is developing a P2P solution to bypass government blocking. The development was shrouded in mystery and rumors. Something interesting was expected in 2018. This was supposed to help monetize Telegram. At the same time, TON Issuer Incorporated was founded, they attracted investments for a future project. Strange and interesting events began to occur on a continuing basis as the case progresses. In particular, the business plan of the future project that appeared on the network. Based on this plan, it could be concluded that such a large-scale project as Telegram was only the first phase of a larger project. Thus, in the future, Telegram should become only one of the many applications in TON project. In April 2019, TON Labs comes into play, headed by Managing Director Alexander Filatov. The main mission of the company was to prepare tools for TON developers.
On September 6, 2019, TON test portal was launched for developers. After some time, it became clear that government regulators were afraid of losing the main bargaining chip of pressure and control of people, the financial system and money. Based on this, in October 2019, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) demanded a ban on the issue of Gram. Pavel Durov was questioned on January 7-8. The essence of the interrogation was to find out how much of the invested money was spent, and whether Gram can be called a security. As a result of long proceedings and litigation, the SEC nevertheless recognized Gram as a security.
It is interesting to note that the SEC was previously suing Block.one. The amount that this platform raised to host decentralized applications was $ 4 billion, which is twice as much as the funds that were collected from TON investors. But for $ 24 million, Block.one will agree with the SEC, since the SEC apparently did not see a threat to itself in their idea.
Sometime later, on May 7, 2020, the developer community announced the launch of the very project from which you are now reading this text. The Free TON project was launched based on the open source Telegram Open Network. At the same time, supporters of Free TON published a Declaration on Decentralization, which is available for signature to everyone who wants to support the launch of Free TON. The declaration was signed by several thousand individuals and legal entities in 23 hours.
Let’s look where it’s gotten us.
We are all ordinary people, some richer, some poorer. To this day, people use systems to pay excess interest for things they shouldn’t. Any researcher is called a criminal, someone who does not fit into the framework of the system and someone who tries to break it. But people should be free and not have limitations in knowledge. Only fighting for your freedom makes sense to live a life filled with valuable events.
Projects such as TON are a step to reforming the economy and people’s lives, and if you do not want to live your whole life in slavery you should at least do something for this. The Free TON project proved that even after the ban idea and business will still live and no bans will be important. After all, where is a community of those who are not indifferent, there will be a new way of life. This is not just a battle of technologies, not just a reformation of the financial market, but a battle of our generation, not depending on gender / skin color / nationality and other things. And the only crime that was made against the SEC is that the proposed TON system is much smarter at the root than their own. This is a battle for decentralization and it also depends on you will we win or not, because this war has begun long ago. We do not see the future, we do not know whether everything will turn out as planned or not, but if there is an opportunity at least to do something for the future, then we need to do it, because there may be not another chance. So let’s support Free TON and try to change life for the better!