TON Devs Worldwide Join Forces to Intervene in SEC Case Against Telegram

A group of international Telegram Open Network contributors have submitted a court document criticizing United States regulators' line of attack against the project.

The group has formed a non-profit association, "The TON Community Foundation," and collectively submitted the brief on Feb. 14 in the form of an amicus curiae.

Who are the members of the TON Community Foundation?

In their filing, the contributors state that the foundation has been formed to represent a "Professional community of active participants in the TON project in whose interest it is to see the TON blockchain mainnet launched as soon as possible."

The foundation comprises 20 teams in the TON global community, designated as "Independent specialists with extensive blockchain experience who are involved in the actual work on the TON blockchain and who write its code, protocol, smart contracts, tools, and applications."

The foundation writes that the unanimous position of the TON dev community is that the TON blockchain is fully operational, has "State-of-the-art prelaunch security" and a developed suite of services.

The brief focuses on particular arguments that were presented by Brown University Professor Maurice Herlihy in his review of TON for the United States Securities and Exchange Commission.

Following Telegram's wildly successful $1.7 billion initial coin offering for TON in 2018, the SEC had launched an investigation into the project in 2019, claiming the entity had not registered with the commission for its ICO and the network's "Gram" tokens.

Despite Professor Herlihy serving as the SEC's blockchain expert, the foundation claims he has mischaracterized the TON network in his report.

What makes the TON blockchain unique, the brief outlines, is that literally "Everything in its network is based on interaction with smart contracts" and "All Grams will be located in smart contracts," so that, "In a way TON is a smart contract platform more than a cryptocurrency one."