“Should Have Bought” is a news podcast by the ForkLog editorial team covering the week’s main industry events and the hottest tokens.
Topics include: the situation surrounding TON and Pavel Durov, Binance and Palestine, the airdrop and listing of Hamster Kombat.
Special guests: Blum co-founder Vladimir Smerkis, Baseley & Partners founder Tatyana-Eliza Baseley, and lawyer Dmitry Levkin-Odrovash.
Participants: ForkLog authors Lena Jess, Alex K., and AI direction editor Vladimir Sliper.
On August 24, French authorities detained Telegram founder Pavel Durov at Le Bourget airport as part of an investigation opened on July 8 against an “unidentified person” on 12 charges.
The charges include illegal provision of cryptographic services, refusal to cooperate with law enforcement, complicity in the distribution of child pornography, aiding drug trafficking, and organized crime activities.
On August 28, Durov was placed under judicial control with a bail of €5 million and required to report to the police twice a week. He is prohibited from leaving France.
On August 28, developers of the TON blockchain system restarted the network after a block generation failure, which lasted about six hours. The team explained that the issue arose due to abnormal load.
TON Foundation’s Investment Director Justin Heon clarified that the stoppage was caused by “junk” operations with the DOGS coin. Validators had to clear the database of old transactions to restore consensus.
However, the same day, a new failure occurred, causing the TON network to experience block production issues for several hours. The most likely cause was high on-chain activity due to the hype around the same DOGS.
The network’s functionality was restored within approximately four hours.
TGE and the airdrop of the meme token Hamster Kombat (HMSTR) are scheduled for September 26.
The initial coin distribution was planned for July but was postponed. The team cited the inability to predict the exact date of the event due to technical difficulties.
The large number of players — about 50 million active users daily in 190 countries — could pose a problem for the distribution of meme tokens, considering the disruptions during the DOGS launch.
Cryptocurrency exchange OKX will be among the first to list HMSTR. Spot market trading will begin on September 26.
CEO of P2P marketplace NoOnes, Ray Youssef, claimed that Binance allegedly seized the funds of all clients from Palestine at the request of the Israel Defense Forces.
He refers to a document from Israel’s Ministry of Defense describing a case of administrative arrest of a user’s cryptocurrency wallets, who received funds from Dubai Exchange in the Gaza Strip, recognized as a terrorist entity in Israel.
However, according to journalist Colin Wu, the freeze affected only a limited number of accounts associated with illegal transactions. Binance CEO Richard Teng confirmed that only a small number of accounts were frozen and dismissed rumors of mass fund seizures, calling them FUD.
