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How TON Foundation extracted $4.66M through RSquad

From Jan 17, 2025 to Jun 19, 2026 TON Foundation sent at least $4.66M to one public RSquad wallet: $2.64M USDT and 1.25M GRAM worth $2.022M when transferred. Earlier addresses and connected wallets are not included.

TON Foundation repeated one cycle three times: when an RSquad product failed to launch, stopped updating, or left TON infrastructure, the same team received the next project. TON BTC Teleport remained on testnet - TON Pay followed. TON Pay stopped moving - Rust Node followed. After the largest transfer, 1.25M GRAM ($2.022M) on Jun 19, the team shipped node/v0.9.0, the final release. Five days later TON removed all ten Rust Node pages from its official documentation.

During TON BTC Teleport and TON Pay development RSquad received $2.09M from TON Foundation. No product split was disclosed. Bitcoin bridge development stopped on Dec 10, 2025; another $513K followed in two transfers: $213K and $300K. It never left testnet. On Jul 13, 2026 TON official node tool, MyTonCtrl v2.17.0, removed BTC Teleport entirely.

RSquad received $742K on Oct 2, 2025. Twenty-eight days later the TON Pay repository appeared. Its 15 commits provide a checkout UI and SDK for TON or jetton transfers through TON Connect. Payment creation and webhooks remain on closed pay.ton.org; official docs say TON Pay is not a payment processor. No updates followed Mar 18.

During TON Rust Node development RSquad received another $2.57M. TON marketed it as a production-grade node built from scratch; the head of TON Core called it an Early Beta Everscale adaptation and warned against mainnet use. The final $2.022M transfer arrived on Jun 19; node/v0.9.0 followed, and public development ended. TON removed it from official docs; no new releases or answers to reported problems followed. Without continuous protocol updates it loses TON compatibility. This is not a maintained C++ alternative but an abandoned Everscale-derived codebase.

All three publicly announced TON Foundation developer-support programs in 2026 allocated just $69K in total: Dubai Builders, AI Hackathon, and Fast Grants. RSquad received 37 times more during Rust Node development. Its six-minute trailer, watched just over 1.3K times, cost $40-50K - almost as much as the Foundation has allocated to independent teams and developers since the start of 2026.

RSquad had been a TON Foundation contractor for years. The official Gram (TON) channel said it was building a crosschain bridge with Foundation developers, while a 2023 paper was signed “by RSquad Blockchain Lab on behalf of TON Foundation”. Teleport, TON Pay, and Rust Node followed. TOP recruited its Product Manager for roadmap and delivery. RSquad was not independent: it was embedded in TON, while the Foundation and TOP managed and delivered its products.

The Russian RSquad company owned by Roman Nguyen and Boris Pimonenko reported RUB 31.9M revenue for 2025. Thirty-nine days before the first investigated payment, RSquad registered its Dubai company, RSQUAD TECHNOLOGIES L.L.C, under licence 1446989.

Before Dubai, the same team ran GAGARIN and publicly tied it to Seychelles. Nguyen was co-founder/CTO; Pimonenko was COO. GAGARIN Terms allowed collection of government ID and bank details, payment restrictions, and third-party KYC sharing, yet named only “GAGARIN and its affiliates and subsidiaries worldwide” - no legal entity, address, governing law, or court. The project's GGR token fell 98.7% from ATH.

For $4.66M the network received a Bitcoin bridge that never launched, a thin wrapper around closed TON Pay, and an Everscale-derived node abandoned after the final payment. Each time the money stopped, public work stopped, while the same embedded team received the next project. This is not infrastructure development; it is TON Foundation budget extraction through RSquad. What could the network have gained if that $4.66M had supported independent developers instead of one embedded contractor?

Thread: x.com/realRivol

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