Telegram’s TON Blockchain Is Live in Private Testing Mode, Shows High Speed: Report

Global messaging app Telegram has reportedly launched a private beta testing of its blockchain, Telegram Open Network (TON), Russian media outlet Vedomosti reports on April 11.

According to Vedomosti, Telegram has opened access to a testing version of TON Blockchain to a limited number of global developers, including Russian dev teams.

Citing two anonymous persons who acquired the early access, the news agency reported that the dev teams were enabled to set up TON Blockchain nodes.

While testing has not provided any specific outcomes, the unnamed testers revealed that the TON Blockchain has demonstrated an “extremely high transaction speed.” However, the specific indicators could not be delivered, since the blockchain’s code — including smart contracts — were in the process of testing, one of the persons has said.

Privacy-focused encrypted messenger Telegram was founded by the brothers Nikolai and Pavel Durov in 2013, and as of March 2018, the service amassed 200 million active users. Recently, three million new users signed up for the app over a 24 hours period when Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp were all experiencing significant outages worldwide, as Durov reported on its official Telegram channel on March 14.

Telegram raised around $1.7 billion in two private initial coin offering (ICO) rounds for both Telegram and its TON platform in 2018.

While Vedomosti reported that Telegram would release a test version of TON in the fall of 2018, there has been no official data on the expected date of TON Blockchain launch, with Durov having declined to confirm a concrete date for TON's release in March 2019.

Recently, Cointelegraph reported that purchase agreements for messenger service Telegram tokens will be terminated if TON does not launch by Oct. 31, 2019.