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TON Developers Worldwide Join to Interfere With SEC’s Case Against Telegram

A group of international Telegram Open Network (TON) developers have filed a court document criticizing attacks United States regulators (the SEC) make against the project.

The group has established a non-profit association, “The TON Community Foundation,” and jointly submitted the brief on February 14 in the form of amicus curiae.

An amicus curiae is a brief offering expertise or insight into a specified case on behalf of an entity which is not formally party to the case (an entity which is neither a plaintiff, defendant, nor legal counsel for either side).

The court decides whether to consider the brief of not at its discretion.

Members of the TON Community Foundation

The brief states that the foundation has been created 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 involves 20 teams in the TON global community, described as “independent specialists with extensive blockchain experience who are involved in the actual work on the TON blockchain and who write its code, protocol, smart contracts, tools, and applications.”

The teams represent more than 2,000 computer scientists, engineers, programmers, and entrepreneurs form China, Russia, France and Spain, among other countries.

Calls to resist the SEC’s “innovation-suffocation regime”

The foundation postulates that the TON blockchain is fully operational, has “state-of-the-art prelaunch security”, and a well-developed set of services. They assert that in its present state it would be ready for launch as a mainnet in a “matter of seconds.”

The filing centers around concrete arguments presented by Brown University Professor Maurice Herlihy in his review of TON for the United States Securities and Exchange Commission.

After Telegram’s highly successful $1.7 billion initial coin offering for TON in 2018, the SEC had started to investigate the project in 2019, claiming that the company did not register its ICO and Gram tokens with the commission. The Herhily report was presented as evidence on behalf of the SEC in the end of December 2019.

In its brief, TON Community Foundation states that the court should dismiss the SEC’s attempts to thrust Telegram and the industry in general under an “innovation-suffocating regime,” it maintains.

It states that other successful blockchain projects, like Bitcoin, Ethereum and Tezos, would have never been launched if they had been subjected to Professor Herlihy’s “academic scrutiny” and his “unrealistic standards of pre-launch performance, security, and maturity.”

Furthermore, though Professor Herlihy is the SEC’s blockchain specialist, the foundation states that he has mischaracterized the TON in his report.

It notes that the 2010 blockchain definition he uses has since become outdated, as it does not consider smart contract functionality as one of the technology’s main features.

The brief points out, that the TON blockchain is unique, as almost “everything in its network is based on interaction with smart contracts” and “all Grams will be located in smart contracts,” so that, “in a way TON is a smart contract platform more than a cryptocurrency one.”

Other arguments of the foundation against Professor Herlihy’s report offer a detailed analysis of the state of the network’s services, readiness for launch, protocol, code and security audit results.

Past battles

One of the reports published by CryptoTheNews details that before entering the blockchain space, Telegram’s creator, Pavel Durov, had already faced strong controversy in his native country, Russia, where he had to resist pressure from the government to access user data amid political unrest.