Binance Research: Telegram Open Network Can Open New Blockchain Era… If It Launches On Time
Telegram Open Network (TON) could open a new era of blockchains capable of supporting thousands of dApps on a true backend technology. According to a new report from Binance Research, there are, however, several challenges along the way.
Binance Research, the market research and analysis arm of Binance, has published a new comprehensive report analyzing the Telegram Open Network (TON), including its huge potential and the challenges and questions it faces.
“Ultimately, it remains to be seen whether TON can launch in time and whether TON can live up to its whitepaper promises. If so, TON will open a new era of blockchains capable of supporting thousands of dApps on a true backend technology,” Binance Research states in a new report titled “Exploring Telegram Open Network.”
To recap: during the first quarter of 2018, TON secured USD 1.7 billion in funding from private investors, with the condition that the capital will be returned to investors if TON fails to keep its promise of issuing the first TON tokens, such as the Gram by October 31, 2019. Binance Research projects that TON might be forced to deliver a minimum viable product to meet its deadline.
The launch of the Telegram Open Network could mark the birth of the 5th generation of blockchains, with features such as dynamic sharding, “tight-coupling” for blockchain interoperability, and multichain networks (both homogeneous and heterogeneous). However, given time constraints, the most straightforward implementation TON could roll out by the deadline would be a distributed system with centralized administration of critical parts.
“Telegram has an estimated user-base of ~500 million users. This broad user-base could immediately turn TON into one of the largest blockchains,” Binance Research noted.
Binance Research further noted that while Telegram’s TON project might draw comparisons with Facebook’s Libra, there are several key differences between the two projects:
While Libra’s vision is to reinvent how money circulates across the globe, TON attempts to radically improve the entire blockchain stack.
From an economic perspective, TON’s Gram is a utility token or crypto-asset subject to price fluctuations (in fiat). On the other hand, Libra offers a fairly stable alternative owing to its full collateralization with traditional assets.
Nevertheless, TON faces a lot of challenges, with many unanswered questions about its specifics that Binance Research poses, such as:
Is the proposed scaling strategy going to work and seamlessly intertwine with a radically reinvented general architecture?
Can the proposed combination of stakeholders in the byzantine fault-tolerant Proof of Stake consensus mechanism avoid the centralization of its actors?
Will TON be able to attract a sufficiently large ecosystem of developers?
About Binance Research
Binance Research provides professional, data-driven insights and analysis for investors in the crypto space to increase the level of transparency and improve the quality of information within the current crypto ecosystem. The team consists of professionals with a background and experience in blockchain engineering, investment banking, strategy consulting, academic research and data science. For more information, visit: https://research.binance.com/