Guys, news about TON hit the internet before christmas, and quite immediately after that Pavel Durov (CEO of Telegram) tweeted this:

"Attention: Telegram publishes its official announcements only at https://telegram.org . Everything else is most likely scam."

source: https://twitter.com/durov/status/944360557318205440

He hasn't actually denied it so it's possible to be true. Telegram has always been a nonprofit organization so these kind of news are sceptical. Providing payment/money transfering system for their userbase would be a great move, but creating a cryptocurrency doesn't sound very nonprofit.

The waiting time is very long indeed. I registered 13.12.2017 and my account got verified 29.12.2017 (16 days).

I did this in the early/mid stages of the december cryptorush (ripple was 0.25$ back then and people were making bitstamp accounts to get ripple) so I can imagine it being even longer the later you made your account.