A group of Telegram Open Network (TON) developers, calling themselves “The TON Community Foundation,” have submitted a court document criticizing the SEC’s prosecution of the project.
The former messaging app turned blockchain developer has been embroiled in a long-running suit with the United States Securities and Exchanges Commission, which alleges that US$1.7 billion raised from the sale of ‘Gram’ tokens between January and March 2018 should have been registered with the authority because the tokens constitute a security. Telegram has consistently denied the accusations and has recently been backed up by the community of international developers building the blockchain on which the digital coin will be based.
The TON Community Foundation, a non-profit body collectively representing Telegram’s developers, has submitted an amicus curia, which is a court filing that offers expertise or insight into a given case on behalf of an entity that is not formally part of the case. The filing states that the foundation was established to represent a “professional community of active participants in the TON project in whose interest it is to see the TON blockchain mainnet launched as soon as possible.”
The foundation is split into 20 teams of “independent specialists” who collectively make up over 2,000 computer scientists, engineers, programmers, and entrepreneurs based in China, Russia, and Spain, among other countries. The group argues that the lawsuit against Telegram is part of a broader effort by the SEC to place the crypto industry under an “innovation-suffocating regime,” and that particular arguments made by the SEC’s blockchain expert, Professor Maurice Herlihy, are “unrealistic standards of pre-launch performance, security, and maturity.”
The group of developers has countered the SEC’s concerns over the security capabilities of Telegram’s blockchain by saying TON is fully operational, has “state-of-the-art prelaunch security” and a developed suite of services. They say that, in its current state, TON would be ready for launch as a mainnet in a “matter of seconds.”
