Telegram looks all set to unveil the ‘third generation’ Telegram Open Network offering support to thousands of decentralized applications
Popular messaging app Telegram is gearing up for some special plans ahead this year. As per sources, the company is planning to launch its own ‘third generation’ blockchain network “Telegram Open Network” (TON) along with its own native cryptocurrency. Telegram’s blockchain network is expected to host superior features much above that offered by Ethereum’s blockchain.
In order to fund this project, Telegram will adopt the path of Initial Coin Offering (ICO) which is expected to be one of the largest pre-sales worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Telegram is already one of the biggest messaging platforms around the world and its popularity is creating a lot of demand in the market.
Telegram is already the de facto communication platform used by the global cryptocurrency community. Thus adding its own cryptocurrency to its platform would give an enormous boost to Telegram’s payment system, which will be completely independent of any bank or government.
The cryptocurrency powered payment system in Telegram will allow transferring funds quite securely due to the app encryption provided by blockchain technology. Moreover, users will also be able to bypass the remittance fees for transferring of funds across global borders and make micropayments, which otherwise would incur a huge credit card fees.
In the pre-ICO, Telegram is expected raise $500 million with its potential total token value going up to a whopping $3 to $5 billion. This will be the biggest every cryptocurrency raise by any private firm after Tezos, that managed to raise $230 million in July 2017.
This figures could possibly change as the ICO sees the actual launch this March 2018. However, sources close to this story say that ICO will require a real fiat currency like the U.S. Dollar but not other cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ether.
A leaked video (see above) of the “Telegram Open Network” gives us some interesting insights into Telegram’s scalability plans ahead. The Telegram platform as on date hosts 180 million active users, with 500,000 new sign-ups over 70 billion messages exchanged daily.
The video gives us some insights into the what the “Telegram Open Network” can offer. TON is setting up some very huge expectations with claims like instant off-chain transactions and handling millions of transactions per second, support of billions of users for thousands of decentralized apps, infinite sharding to prevent congestion and much more.
Well, if this turns out to be true, it is going to be much much bigger than what Ethereum has to offer and will also give a major push to the solution of existing blockchain scalability issues, which the developers are facing right now.
As per sources, the Telegram’s cryptocurrency will be called “Gram” and could possibly gain a huge popularity being tied to its chat app. For TON, the company has outlined a four-stage plan which includes: TON Services, TON DNS, TON Payments, and TON blockchain.
Note that Telegram is not the first tech messaging app to arrive with such a plan. Last year, Canadian messaging platform Kik introduced the plan to integrate its own cryptocurrency into its chat, which can be used to avail several digital services.
With the decentralized blockchain technology offering a huge potential for scalability, other big tech giants also started looking into it. Recently, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that he also looks forward to studying cryptocurrencies in 2018 and its underlying blockchain technology.