The team behind the development of TON, the Telegram blockchain on which the GRAM cryptocurrency is based, has received a report written by Elias Simos of Decentral Park Capital in which different aspects of the Telegram Open Network project are analysed, as well as the current state of progress.
TON and GRAM are about to arrive
TON is about to be launched on the market and only a few days are left before this event, preceded by the publication on GitHub of the project’s source code. After raising $1.7 billion, investors will be able to obtain the public keys on October 16th in order to receive their GRAM tokens as soon as possible.
TON: why create another blockchain and a new token?
This isn’t one of the many projects born from a non-concrete idea, without funds for its realisation and with a team that is unworthy or unprepared. Telegram has already more than 250 million users (2 times more than those of Uber and growing) and the launch of TON could truly act as a bridge for those people who do not use the banking systems for various reasons:
- geographical location;
- poverty;
- jurisdiction;
- lack of trust.
The launch of this blockchain will undoubtedly mark a milestone in the cryptocurrency era. Telegram could soon become a new platform for Web 3.0 applications, just as the Apple App Store has proved to be in the past.
The team is not to be underestimated: Pavel and Nikolai Durov are the founders of the Russian social network VKontakte and Telegram itself. They were able, through two private sales between February and March 2018, to raise an estimated figure of around 1.7 billion dollars. Not to mention that Telegram has never gone too far in terms of marketing compared to its competitors, quite the contrary.
2018, ICOs and private investments
The difficulties experienced during 2018, which saw the collapse of bitcoin and a bearish phase of the asset, clearly discouraged many investors. In particular, retail investors have vanished: the lack of credibility in ICOs (Initial Coin Offerings), partly due to various scams that have invaded the market, rendering it obsolete, has helped a lot from this point of view.
In the meantime, IEOs (Initial Exchange Offerings) have emerged, although they have developed very differently from ICOs, private investments have increased and many projects have waited a long time to launch their products, hoping for a better moment. This is why Telegram, together with its GRAM cryptocurrency, has decided to enter the sector.
In the past few months, several doubts have arisen about the actual usefulness of the GRAM token. It will serve both as a consensus mechanism to facilitate validation within the network (through Proof of Stake), and as a way to make payments to different services, including dApps or other users.
The substantial difference between Libra, Facebook’s cryptocurrency, and GRAM is that the former will be anchored to a pool of currencies, while the latter will be subject to the clear laws of normal trading and its value will be decided by the market itself. However, TON looks more like a central bank, thanks to TON Reserve and TON Foundation, and can therefore decide whether to intervene to support the value of GRAM at any time.
Supply and distribution of the GRAM token
GRAM will initially have a supply of 5 billion tokens. The report by Decentral Park Capital estimates that about 54% has already been sold to investors (in the two rounds mentioned above), while the inflation rate of 2%, almost certainly, will be used as a reward for the validation of the blocks.
The 12% will be immediately available to traders while the remaining 42% will be gradually unlocked over time, between 6 and 18 months after the launch of the Mainnet.
The 4% should serve as an incentive for developers and the community, what remains will be controlled by the TON Foundation and TON Reserve.
GRAM: main use case
One of the main use cases of the GRAM token will be the possibility to make payments via bots. It is estimated that there are over 800,000 bots on Telegram and that 1/4 of the users use them at least once. Bots are just software written in various programming languages that interact with users, or with groups and channels, depending on the functions they have to perform.
ButtonWallet, for example, was one of the few to integrate the TON testnet guaranteeing the possibility of hosting a multi-currency wallet and a p2p (peer to peer) transaction service.
Users will also be able to exchange money, this will probably be the most used feature. Bots that so far allow playing poker, betting and more, do not use real money. There will be a chance to monetise all this at once, offering a huge service for hundreds of millions of customers.
The report indicates that, probably, TON Payments will not be active immediately. This means that transactions will have higher commissions, at least initially, and that bottlenecks may occur.
TON: a stablecoin is not to be excluded
Further reflection can be made on the stablecoin topic. The market, as far as these cryptocurrencies are concerned, has grown enormously, capitalisation has reached 5 billion dollars and nothing prevents TON from someday being able to create its own stablecoin, even if there is no official possibility at the moment.
Never before has an application of such great importance decided to develop its own cryptocurrency and launch it on the market, being able to draw on a huge pool of users.
Facebook is far larger than Telegram, with billions of users against millions, but the difference between GRAM and Libra is substantial and the repost estimates that Telegram’s token will reach a market capitalization of 20 billion dollars in 2024.
The team behind the project, the initial fundraising and the millions of users who are already part of it have made the launch of TON and the subsequent GRAM token one of the most anticipated events of the last two years.
