Telegram is no longer going to pursue an appeal against a court order barring it from launching the Telegram Open Network (TON), and distributing the Gram tokens.
A US federal court in March issued an injunction that stopped the company from proceeding with the $1.7 billion project after the US Securities and Exchanges Commission accused the messaging platform and its officials of offering a security token in its 2018 sale to investors.
Court documents published by CourtListener indicate that Telegram has dropped the appeal it filed following the March 2020 court order. By withdrawing the appeal, Telegram has made it clear that the recent announcement that it would no longer pursue the launch of the TON blockchain and Gram tokens is final
Is this Telegram’s final bow?
Telegram announced its ICO sale in 2017 and which turned into one of the largest crowdsales in crypto by the time it ended at the beginning of 2018. Plans to launch the blockchain project, however, hit the rocks for the first time in October 2019 when SEC filed its lawsuit.
The company still had hopes of launching the platform by April 2021, even advising American investors to accept a 72 percent payout, while the rest had the option of waiting with a higher percentage.
However, on May 12, Telegram CEO Pavel Durov announced that the company would not continue with its TON platform development and launch plans. That, according to Durov, had been informed by the US federal court’s order, which banned the company from launching its project from wherever that may be.
Durov said that the firm was ending its active involvement in the project, news that came just days after the launch of another blockchain platform dubbed, Free TON Blockchain.
A week later, reports surfaced that several TON investors from the US and from around the world were contemplating bringing a lawsuit against Telegram.
There might yet be another twist in the saga of the failed $1.7 billion project. However, dropping the appeal could mean Durov, and Telegram has indeed thrown in the towel.