Telegram has revealed in its SEC filing that it has raised $850 million in the pre-Initial Coin Offering (ICO).
The pre-ICO was limited to accredited investors only with the popular chat app having a target of raising $600 million; however, demand pushed it to nearly one billion. The money raised will most likely be used for a number of things including development of TON blockchain; however, nothing concrete has been revealed by Telegram as of now.
Telegram’s founder Nikolai Durov has revealed a number of things in the TON whitepaper, which is filled with a number of buzzwords including sharding, payment channels, Lightning Network, and even blockchain squared.
While the buzzwords create curiosity, the whitepaper doesn’t quite reveal what’s the use of it all. According to the founder of Telegram though, “The aim of this text is to provide a first description of the Telegram Open Network (TON) and related blockchain, peer-to-peer, distributed storage and service hosting technologies.
One important thing that contradicts Durov’s stand is the information published officially. Durov had said earlier that everything official will be published on their site telegram.org; however, the whitepaper is stored in some Google drive. So is it a scam? In fact, we can’t even find an official announcement. All of this was seemingly broken by a video, with TechCrunch then stating they had spoken to numerous sources, but Durov wouldn’t speak to them.
“Sources say Durov has decided to combine both a centralized and decentralized infrastructure, since a totally decentralized network doesn’t scale as fast as one which has some elements of centralization,” they said at the time.
“While I was working at Telegram, cryptocurrencies, ICO, blockchain, etc were never discussed,” Anton Rozenberg, who left the company in April of last year, apparently said.
The pre-ICO was limited to the very rich, the very well connected, who by the force of the discriminatory Securities Act get to participate first at rock bottom prices, with the rest to be dumped upon, should appall both the meritocratic right and the equality left.
Because the people are basically being shut out of the value creation process, except when it comes to creating value for the financiers alone, who dwell in the dark allies of google drives, media leaks, super professional video adverts “randomly” found, and all of it without SEC saying one word for it is the rich’s playground.