Telegram's TON blockchain to begin public tests over weekend

Layer 1s • August 30, 2019, 2:57PM EDT

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Telegram will begin public testing its long-awaited TON blockchain on September 1, according to a report by Russian news site Vedomosti. As part of its test, Telegram will also release the code for running TON nodes and instructions on how to set up a node. TON's consensus mechanism and sharding scheme will also be available for testing.

Earlier this week, The New York Times reported that Telegram had notified its investors that it is ready to send out its initial batch of the TON blockchain's native token, GRAM, within the next two months. Telegram also plans to give its 200 million-plus users access to GRAM wallets. Furthermore, according to CoinDesk, TON Labs, a technology company building products and service for TON, is working on a Solidity compiler tool to enable Ethereum dApps and help developers migrate their code over to TON.

Telegram raised $1.7 billion in a May 2018 ICO from investors including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Benchmark and Sequoia Capital. In May 2019, Telegram released its blockchain testnet.