Telegram ordered to pay $625K in fees over ‘GRAM’ ticker lawsuit

A US District Court has ordered mobile messaging service Telegram to pay nearly $625,000 in legal fee to a small crypto firm called Lantah LLC.

Telegram filed a lawsuit against Lantah in 2018 over the use of ‘GRAM’ ticker, bringing claims of copyright infringement, false designation of origin and unfair competition.

However, US District Judge Charles Breyer in a November 2 ruling ordered Telegram to pay Lantah $618,240 in attorney’s fees and $6,737.35 in costs.

Telegram engineers in 2017 began working on the blockchain platform called Telegram Open Network (TON) and a cryptocurrency they were going to name GRAM.

In 2018, Lantah applied for the GRAM mark with the US Patent and Trademark Office.

However, Telegram faced other legal challenges to its cryptocurrency project as it came under scrutiny from the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

The SEC in an order last October asked Telegram to stop sales of its Gram cryptocurrency following the company’s failure to register an early sale of $1.7 billion in tokens prior to launching the network.

The SEC accused Telegram of violating securities laws.

After a legal battle in the US, Telegram finally decided to withdraw its cryptocurrency-focused subsidiary TON.

Making the announcement in his channel on May this year, Telegram Founder Pavel Durov said that “a US court stopped TON from happening”.

With the shutdown of TON, the GRAM ticker was also not required and a motion to voluntarily dismiss the case against Lantah was submitted.

Telegram’s submission of a motion to voluntarily dismiss the lawsuit was accepted on the condition that the company pays Lantah’s legal costs, ZDNet reported on Wednesday.