Undeterred by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s lawsuit, developers and investors in Telegram’s blockchain project have formed a nonprofit for community governance. Since October, Telegram has been fighting the SEC’s allegation it had been selling unregistered securities and arguing it’s been building a decentralized system, like bitcoin and ethereum.
One of the TON Community Foundation’s first actions was to defend Telegram, filing a friend of the court brief in the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of New York.
The brief claims the “community has about 2,000 active participants” and that the TON Blockchain is fully operational”. It also stated that the reason it hasn’t is because the SEC’s lawsuit against Telegram, brought in October, halted the launch of the blockchain, though not the project’s development.
The brief takes aim at the expert report of Brown University professor Maurice Herlihy, earlier submitted by the SEC, which evaluated TON as lacking critical components and not secure enough.
The list of participants so far includes 22 people representing their companies, among them TON Labs itself, broker Da Vinci Capital, wallet apps Atomic Wallet and Button Wallet, local communities of investors and developers TON China and TON France, and a number of tech startups. Telegram itself is not listed.
The foundation, helmed by an elected Governing Council, will coordinate the developers, validators, stakers and other members of the community to promote the usage of TON via education, research and development, grants and lobbying, the declaration says.
On February 18, the SEC asked the court to bar the TON Community Foundation from submitting its brief, calling the nonprofit’s claims “unsworn, unattributed and unverified”.
