The journey of TON wouldn't be complete without acknowledging the creative minds steering its course. 

Dr. Nikolai Durov, founder and CEO of Telegram, along with his brother Pavel, initiated TON in 2018. 

But Towards the end of 2020, Telegram was finally forced to step away from TON due to pressure from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), 

Kirill Emelyanenko, a programmer and Ph.D. in Physics and Mathematics, and Anatoliy Makosov, a software developer decided to learn more about the technology behind TON and continue its development. 

This marked the beginning of what would became the TON Foundation.

To bring TON back from the dead, make it popular, and find a way to integrate its coin with Telegram.

Andrew Rogozov (formerly Vice President at VK and the Founder of The Open Plaform), Steve Yun, Justin Hyun, Julian Tan Yong Kiat (formerly of Binance), and other professionals, later joined TON, which was a hugely significant moment for the project.

The TON team began to expand rapidly, thanks to them. 

TON Foundation would have remained a small group of tech geeks without these specialists.

Everyone in the team is exceptionally talented, and today, TON is technologically ahead of all other existing blockchains, especially in terms of its ability to scale to a large number of users and transactions.