Telegram has announced that it will no longer be continuing its blockchain platform Telegram Open Network (TON) after losing an ongoing battle with the United States (US) Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

“Telegram’s active involvement with TON is over,” wrote Pavel Durov, founder and CEO in an official post. “You may see – or may have already seen – sites using my name or the Telegram brand or the "TON" abbreviation to promote their projects. Don’t trust them with your money or data. “

“No present or past member of our team is involved with any of these projects. While networks based on the technology we built for TON may appear, we won’t have any affiliation with them and are unlikely to ever support them in any way,” he said.

Telegram has been working on developing a blockchain platform TON for the last two and a half years along with a cryptocurrency named Gram.

TON was designed to offer decentralised cryptocurrency to any user with a smartphone quite similar to Facebook’s Libra project which has been under the scanner for a while now.

The project has now been called off after a long ongoing battle with the SEC.

The SEC had ordered the messaging platform to halt the sales of its cryptocurrency after it had failed to register its initial sale of $1.7 billion in tokens prior to the launch of the network. Furthermore, it had also banned the company from selling Grams outside of the US with the reasoning that US citizens abroad may be able to access the currency.

“The US court declared that Grams couldn't be distributed not only in the United States but globally. Why? Because it said, a US citizen might find some way of accessing the TON platform after it launched,” wrote Durov arguing against the ruling in his announcement.

According to the Telegram CEO, US courts should not be able to mandate the stop on sale of the cryptocurrency outside of the country urging other companies to speak up for the decentralization.

“I want to conclude this post by wishing luck to all those striving for decentralization, balance and equality in the world. You are fighting the right battle. This battle may well be the most important battle of our generation. We hope that you succeed where we have failed,” he wrote.

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