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Just last week, Telegram delivered the announcement that it would have to delay the launch of its anticipated TON blockchain and grams cryptocurrency by 12 months, until April 2021.

Today (May 7, 2020), community developers ‘TON Labs’ has released its own unofficial fork called ‘Free TON Blockchain’ comprising a full blockchain and cryptocurrency: based on but independent of Telegram’s official TON development. According to the official announcement, the open source code is to be made available imminently.

Free TON Blockchain will likely exist primarily as a proof-of-concept, laying the groundwork for the long-awaited Telegram (official) TON blockchain network project; although there is a possibility that it may overshadow the official project, depending on the level of innovation it does (or does not) spawn.

The Unofficial TON Team

Founded in 2018, TON Labs is a team which originated in Telegram’s TON community and describes itself as a company comprising a globally dispersed, decentralized team of “60+ high level developers, engineers, and professionals from all over the world.”.

TON Labs claims that its focus is “developing core infrastructure and an open source ecosystem for TON (The Open Network).” - with a mission of helping to “deliver a complete TON node implementation, a versatile toolchain, and a set of client-side tools, as well as novel ways for users to interact with fintech services”.

According to the TON Labs’s website, the purpose of the ‘Free TON Blockchian’ ecosystem is to enable users to deploy, create, manage and distribute TON-based blockchains for both enterprise and consumer enterprise applications. It is described as an “end-to-end open source infrastructure designed to enable developers and users to work with TON blockchain”.

Furthermore, the team was formed to help “maximise the chances for TON to revolutionize the blockchain” - suggesting that they had doubts in its potential for success - likely due to its ongoing legal troubles.

Why Create An Unofficial TON Fork?

Back in May 2020, Telegram suffered as a result of a United States District Court ruling in favour of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) which had initiated a lawsuit over the original fundraising round / token sale, stating that due to its lack of a utility-based value at the time (that it was only speculative) that the crypto was technically an unregistered securities sale.

This caused a delay in the network's launch - till May 2021: this was the second delay to affect the network.

The TON Labs team was formed to help “maximise the chances for TON to revolutionize the blockchain” - suggesting that they had doubts in its potential for success - likely due to these ongoing legal troubles.

In Other News...

Beyond Telegram and TON blockchain: there have actually been a handful of news stories to break this week regarding the convergence of blockchain and social media - although the most prominent represents a departure of a well known content creator from a blockchain platform, back to a more mainstream and centralized platform.

On May 6, 2020: centralized (and Google owned) social media platform YouTube announced that it had secured an contract agreement with Felix Kjellberg, AKA PewDiePie, to ensure that all of his live-streamed content would be exclusively broadcast on the YouTube video platform.

This supersedes and agreement signed last year which saw Kjellberg broadcast his live streamed content exclusively for a 12 month period as of April 2019, on the blockchain based Dlive streaming platform.

Dlive is a blockchain-based streaming platform which was acquired by Bittorrent in December 2019 (itself owned by Justin Sun’s TRON organisation). As such: this is not a significant or wholly negative blow against blockchain as a whole, due to the tenuous nature of both TRON and Sun’s operations.

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