Telegram co-founder and CEO Pavel Durov has expressed excitement almost the Telegram Open Network (TON) engineering still developing later on Telegram officially abandoned the projection final year.

"I'm proud that the engineering we created is alive and evolving. When information technology comes to scalability and speed, TON is still years ahead of everything else in the blockchain realm," Durov said in a Telegram mail on Thursday.

He noted that the project rebranded from TON to Toncoin. Unlike the original TON, the new project is contained of Telegram. "But I wish its team the same success. Coupled with the right go-to-marketplace strategy, they accept all they demand to build something epic," he noted.

Durov'south remarks came amidst Donate, a Telegram-verified payments service, preparing to enable donations on Telegram using the Toncoin cryptocurrency.

TON on Thursday announced a partnership with Donate, maxim that users will soon be able to make donations and pay for their subscriptions in Toncoin. At the aforementioned fourth dimension, channel administrators will be able to collect their income in the cryptocurrency. The Subscriptions service previously announced the news on Mon.

TON is a blockchain that was created by brothers Nikolai and Pavel Durov in 2022, but the two and Telegram stepped away from the projection in 2022 later on a lengthy boxing with the United States Securities and Commutation Commission. The SEC specifically won a case where information technology accused Telegram of violating the U.S. securities laws by conducting its $ane.7billion initial coin offer in 2022.

Despite Telegram officially terminating the projection more than a yr agone, the idea of TON has not been abandoned, with the original open-source project giving rise to a number of independent spinoffs.

At the time of writing, the TON Russian customs has almost 160,000 subscribers on its official Telegram channel, while the global Toncoin customs counts about 50,000 followers.

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Toncoin 30-day price chart. Source: CoinGecko

Amid the latest news, Toncoin's price has seen notable growth, surging over 23% over the past 24 hours and trading at $2.93 at the fourth dimension of writing, co-ordinate to data from CoinGecko. The token's all-fourth dimension loftier was $4.v recorded on Nov. 12. The token is listed on some of the world'southward largest crypto exchanges, including OKEx, FTX and EXMO.