Andrew Rogozov Joins TON Foundation to lead Telegram's Successor Project on Blockchain

The Open Network (TON) is pleased to introduce Andrew Rogozov, the former CEO of VK, as an exclusive addition to its staff. Rogozov will become a Founding Member of the TON Foundation, spearheading the drive for a community-led successor to the Telegram Open Network.

Besides, the Telegram Open Network was a proposed high-performance Proof-of-Stake blockchain that aimed to solve some of the most pressing issues in the blockchain ecosystem at the time, such as scalability and user experience, the team says. It was originally designed and developed by Telegram, and led by its CEO and Founder Pavel Durov.

However, Telegram was compelled to return the funds acquired in its fundraise and was forbidden from releasing additional tokens after legal wranglings with a US-based regulator. Conversely, TON supporters, including winners of TON blockchain competitions, believed that the system was just too well-designed to be abandoned.

As a result, the community cloned the source and proceeded to develop on the TON’s fundamental technology, dubbing it “The Open Network”, the spiritual successor to the Telegram Open Network. With TON now simply standing for “The Open Network,” the project successfully sought the transfer of the ton.org domain from Telegram and is now poised to implement the Telegram team’s objective. To do so, they decided to bring in the best hands to oversee their vision.

Andre Rogozov’s experience goes back to 2007 when he joined VKontakte (later shortened to VK) widely known as the “Russian Facebook” as an engineer and later rose through the ranks to become the CEO of VK.com. Rogozov is presently the Vice President of Social at VK (previously Mail.ru), the company that bought VK in 2014 and rebranded to VK in October 2021. Later this year, Rogozov will transfer to a consulting role at VK.

Because of his extensive experience and previous interactions with Pavel Durov and the Telegram team, Andrew Rogozov is a critical addition to the TON Foundation for these goals since Durov stopped being VK CEO in 2014.

As a Founding Member of the TON Foundation, Rogozov will use his leadership skills to help TON realize its potential as an open-source, efficient, and widely used blockchain.

I see huge opportunities at the intersection of the TON blockchain, the Telegram platform with its active audience of over 600 million users, and the community of world-class developers who have the potential to create a large number of next-generation global product companies. As we speak, multiple products have already been shipped that are at the intersection of TON and Telegram: the Tonkeeper wallet, the @donate inline bot in Telegram handling subscriptions to paid channels with Toncoin, and the @wallet bot