Telegram Is Forced To Pay $620,000 After Dropping Lawsuit

Telegram is forced to pay $620,000 after dropping the copyright lawsuit as reported previously in our cryptocurrency news.

The messaging giant Telegram is forced to pay $620,000 in legal fees after the defeat in the copyright lawsuit. The messaging app was ordered to pay the sum in legal fees to Lantah LLC after a failed attempt to sue the company over copyright claims. The claims revolved around the use of the GRAM ticker which was supposed to be Telegram’s cryptocurrency. the token was intended to be used within the Telegram Open Network which is a blockchain iteration of Telegram messaging service. In the meantime, Lantah which positions itself as a global marketplace for crypto payments leveraged the GRAM ticker for the token.

Things came to a halt in 2020 after Telegram’s long and messy battle with the regulators over its supposedly unregistered token offering. The Securities and Exchange Commission submitted the GRAM offering which raised an excess of $1.7 billion by violating federal securities laws. As a result, Telegram was made to pay back more than $1.2 billion to investors and got slapped with a civil penalty worth $18.5 million. Very soon after that, the Ton project was abandoned. Now with TON and GRAM being almost dead, Telegram got forced to cut its losses, dropping the lantah lawsuit and paying legal fees.

As reported previously, Telegram has terminated its blockchain project named the Telegram Open Network (TON). And while the closure of the project was in May 2020, the TON test has been running for almost one year. In the latest updates, we can see that Telegram will shut down TON and its testnet, and bring the entire project to an end. An update shared on July 6 shows that the official TON development group on Telegram announced that it would be discontinuing its support of the test network for TON. The remaining TON validators will be also turned off by August 1. In the post, we see that the TON official recommended network participants save all of their relevant data and stop their testing processes.

The CEO of the popular encrypted messaging platform denied the reports that the company is preparing to sell the company after the failed Telegram blockchain project. According to a report by the local tech publication iXBT, the internet company from Russia Mail.ru is one of the parties involved in acquired the company.