According to the results of a community vote on Feb. 22, users and validators of The Open Network (TON), a layer one blockchain previously created by Telegram, have voted to suspend miners' wallets for four years if they are inactive and have never made an outgoing transaction. The decision resulted in 1,081,389,416 TON being suspended, worth an estimated $2.58 billion at the time of publication and accounting for over 20% of TON tokens outstanding. The validator vote, which began on Feb. 21, 2023, was passed after the first two rounds without requiring a third tie round to break the tie. …

It has been a tumultuous year for the crypto investors who have witnessed the total crypto market capitalization tumble from about $2.2 trillion at the beginning of 2022 to about $850 billion in December. The sharp erosion in valuation was caused due to several high-profile bankruptcies in 2022. The entire Terra ecosystem imploded with the collapse of its LUNA token and TerraUSD (UST) stablecoin. The failure of Three Arrows Capital followed this black swan event, and the final blow came as FTX underwent a bank run and imploded. These back-to-back events triggered a liquidity and credit crunch and appear to …

The relief rally in the United States equities markets took a breather this week as all major averages closed in the red. Traders seem to have booked profits before the busy economic calendar next week. The S&P 500 index dropped 3.37%, but a minor positive for the cryptocurrency markets is that Bitcoin (BTC) has not followed the equities markets lower. This suggests that crypto traders are not panicking and dumping their positions with every downtick in equities. The range-bound action in Bitcoin suggests that traders are avoiding large bets before the Federal Reserve’s rate hike decision on Dec. 14. However, …

The United States equities markets shrugged off the hotter-than-expected labor data on Dec. 2 and recovered sharply from their intraday low. This suggests that market observers believe the Federal Reserve may not change its stance of slowing the pace of rate hikes because of the latest jobs data. Although the FTX crisis broke the positive correlation between the US equities markets and Bitcoin (BTC), the recent strength in the equities markets shows a risk-on sentiment. This could be favorable for the cryptocurrency space and may attract dip buyers. The broader crypto recovery may pick up steam after more clarity emerges …

Telegram is set to build a set of decentralized tools, including noncustodial wallets and decentralized exchanges, according to founder Pavel Durov via his Telegram channel on Nov. 30. The initiative is a response to the recent FTX collapse, said Durov, as the industry ended up being concentrated in the "hands of a few to abuse their power. As a result, a lot of people lost their money when FTX, one of the largest exchanges, went bankrupt." This announcement comes weeks after the launch of Fragment, a decentralized auction platform for unique usernames based on The Open Network, or TON, a …

The FTX collapse continues to stoke fears of a contagion in the cryptocurrency space as investors wait to hear about businesses that may face the heat. One of the marquee names to come under the circle of suspicion is the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (GBTC), which has seen its discount to Bitcoin’s (BTC) price reach record levels of about 50%. Traders hate uncertainty and shy away from investing during these periods. That could be one of the reasons for a lack of buying interest in Bitcoin even after the sharp fall in its price. The Stock-to-Flow (S2F) model, which had seen …

The popular messaging app Telegram announced on Oct. 26 the official launch of its new marketplace built on the Telegram Open Network (TON) blockchain. The marketplace will serve as an auction platform on which rare Telegram handles will be up for grabs. Initially, the idea was mentioned back in August on app founder Pavel Durov’s Telegram channel after the TON Foundation successfully auctioned off TON DNS domains. Telegram will start with auctions of four and five-letter handles, with this being the first time shorter handles will be made available to all users. The auction will last a week with a …

The popular messaging app Telegram has developed a new marketplace that doesn’t involve nonfungible tokens (NFTs). The social messaging platform said that it is all set to launch its marketplace for auctioning unique usernames for social platforms, an idea first floated in August. In an official announcement on its Telegram channel, the firm said that the development phase of the marketplace is near its end. The marketplace is based on its native blockchain called The Open Network (TON). The idea was first teased by the company founder Pavel Durov in late August this year when he proposed a marketplace that …

Pavel Durov, the founder of encrypted messaging app Telegram, has floated the idea of a marketplace that could utilize “NFT-like smart contracts” to auction highly-sought after usernames. Durov made the suggestion after the “success” of domain name auctions by The Open Network (TON), a layer-1 blockchain originally designed by the Telegram team. The blockchain project launched the TON DNS service enabling users to assign human-readable names to crypto wallets, smart contracts, and websites in mid-July. In a message to his personal Telegram group named “Durov’s Channel” on Aug. 23, he noted that he was “really impressed by the success of …

The Open Network (TON) Foundation is the latest cryptocurrency company to upgrade its ecosystem with Ethereum Name Service (ENS)-like domain names. The TON Foundation on Thursday announced the launch of TON DNS, a new service that allows users to assign human-readable names to crypto wallets, smart contracts and websites. Similar to other popular crypto-related domain names like “.eth” or “.crypto” the domain zone for TON DNS is “.ton” and will enable users to access decentralized applications in a simple way. With TON DNS, users will be able to use simple and short domain names instead of typing in a long …

The TON Foundation, an organization developing the Telegram-initiated blockchain project, the TON blockchain, on Tuesday officially announced that TON miners have mined the final toncoin. "Tens of thousands of miners have mined the entire issuance of toncoins, which was about 5 billion tokens,” TON Foundation founding member and core developer Anatoly Makosov said in a statement to Cointelegraph. The last toncoin was mined on June 28, he noted. The end of toncoin mining marks a major milestone in TON's distribution, starting its new era as an entirely PoS blockchain. From now on, new toncoins will only enter circulation via PoS …

An executive at Russia’s Chamber of Commerce and Industry has called on the government to conduct cross-border settlements in cryptocurrencies and central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). Chamber President Sergei Katyrin sent a letter to Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin, providing a set of proposals for developing cooperation with African countries, the local state-backed publication TASS reported Thursday. In the letter, Katyrin reportedly advocated the use of CBDCs and cryptocurrencies for mutual settlement and payments as part of Russia’s move into Africa amid Western sanctions, stating: “It seems useful to instruct the Ministry of Finance of the Russian Federation, together with …