Earlier this month, Telegram Inc. announced that it was
abandoning its development of the Telegram Open Network
(TON). The move comes after the SEC won a preliminary
injunction against Telegram in the Southern District of New York in
March that blocked Telegram from launching TON and its native
cryptocurrency, the Gram. The Court determined that the SEC
had shown that there was a substantial likelihood it could prove
that Telegram's plan to distribute Grams into a secondary
market constituted an unregistered securities offering. In a
blog post accompanying the announcement, Pavel Durov, the founder
of Telegram, acknowledged that the Court's decision was the
reason for TON's shutdown. Durov expressed frustration
that a U.S. court could prevent a foreign based project from
commencing, stating, "The U.S. can use its control over the
dollar and the global financial system to shut down any bank or
bank account in the world." For more on the Court's decision, please
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