“The ‘frenzy’ around The Open Network (TON) has yet to ‘cool down’ as it continues to receive the latest investment infusion from the veteran crypto venture capital fund Pantera Capital.”
The amount of capital invested into The Open Network by Pantera Capital was not disclosed
The veteran crypto venture capital fund Pantera Capital, which manages over $5 billion in assets, has invested an undisclosed amount into the blockchain The Open Network (TON).
Commenting on the latest investment, a representative of Pantera Capital believes that with over 900 million massive users and over 1 trillion views across Telegram channels monthly, TON has the potential to bring widespread adoption to newcomers in the crypto market.”
We believe that the TON network is still in its early stages, and we are excited to witness the adoption of its ecosystem and new features by Telegram users.
The representative of Pantera Capital
The Open Network is a Layer-1 blockchain network originally designed by the Telegram messaging app development team under the name Telegram Open Network in the early years of 2018. However, the project faced numerous legal troubles from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) throughout the period of 2019 – 2020, with allegations that the company’s previous $1.7 billion initial coin offering (ICO) violated securities laws.
To settle the situation, Telegram’s co-founder and CEO Pavel Durov had to relinquish ownership rights and hand over the project to two developers, Anatoliy Makosov and Kirill Emelyanenko, who then rebranded it as The Open Network and released it as open-source to the community to continue its operation. Since then, the project has made significant progress in the following years.
Pantera Capital’s latest funding deal into The Open Network comes at a time when this Layer-1 blockchain has been in the spotlight, becoming a vibrant Web3 ecosystem with many attractive activities such as revenue sharing with channel owners, allowing users to pay for ads with TON, collaborating with Oyster Labs to launch the Universal Basic Smartphone (UBS), and partnering with HashKey Group to expand services into the Asia-Pacific region.
Recently, Telegram successfully integrated the USDT stablecoin payment onto the TON blockchain. Telegram is even considering its initial public offering (IPO), although its founder stated in a recent interview that there are no IPO plans as previously rumored, while also boasting about his wealth, claiming to have “several hundred million dollars in his bank account and owning Bitcoin for the past 10 years.”
The TON price has reacted positively, rising nearly 8% immediately after the news, currently trading around $5 at the time of writing.
Pantera Capital is ‘accelerating’ its investment activities.
Pantera Capital’s investment in TON comes at a time when the venture capital firm is also finalizing the last KYC procedures for the purchase of a batch of locked Solana (SOL) tokens in the second round, priced around $100 per SOL, due to bankruptcy administrators of the FTX exchange selling them in an auction.
Additionally, Pantera is in the process of negotiating, raising an additional $1 billion for a new cryptocurrency fund worth $1.25 billion to invest in early-stage startups, early-stage tokens, liquidity tokens, and other assets called “Pantera Fund V”.
The new fund has a minimum investment level of $1 million for eligible investors, with the first capital call scheduled for April 1, 2025. According to documents, limited partners will need to contribute at least $25 million to the fund.
If successful, this will be the largest fund since the series of scandals and bankruptcies in the crypto industry in 2022. Previously, in September 2022, Pantera achieved its target of raising $1.25 billion for its second blockchain fund. However, Pantera Fund V will be completely separate from this $1.25 billion fund.
