Telegram has raised an initial $850M for its billion-dollar ICO

It looks like Telegram’s billion-dollar ICO has reached its first milestone after the chat app company raised an initial $850 million, according to a filing.

A document submitted to the SEC earlier this week states that the money was raised “for the development of the TON Blockchain, the development and maintenance of Telegram Messenger and the other purposes.” The security is described as “purchase agreements for cryptocurrency” and the filing is signed by Telegram CEO Pavel Durov.

Read our earlier story for full details from Telegram’s TON white paper.

This initial sum is most likely the pre-sale stage of the ICO which, as TechCrunch reported on extensively and in detail last month, was targeted at venture capital firms and top figures in the investment community who were given deep discounts to buy Telegram’s Gram token. The pre-sale was originally targeted at raising $600 million, but demand pushed the figure up to $850 million, according to a Bloomberg report.

Telegram initially planned to raise a further $600 million to develop its TON project via a public sale that starts in March, according to documents seen by TechCrunch, but it remains to be seen whether that figure will be adjusted. Bloomberg previously suggested the public sale component would expand to $1.15 billion, bringing the total raised to nearly $2 billion if successful.

Telegram CEO Durov did not reply to an emailed request for comment at the time of writing.

Either way, the sale promises to be the largest ICO seen to date. The pre-sale figure alone tops all other ICOs held by some margin.

The sale represents the first outside investment in Telegram, which has been self-funded by Durov and his older brother Nikolai, who founded VKontakte, the social networking site often referred to as ‘Russia’s Facebook.’ The duo fled Russia in 2014 after a fall-out with investors, who they claim had links to the government, and they later set up Telegram.

Demand around the token sale has been unprecedented, primarily because of Telegram’s unique position within the crypto community. Its messaging app is used by the majority of ICO projects, with its group feature particularly popular among crypto watchers — that includes more shady elements such as ‘pump and dump’ scammers.

Quartz recently reported that pre-sale investors are selling their allocation for upwards of double the price, while others had stayed away from the sale out of caution. There has certainly been hype, with a bevy scammers setting up fake websites and campaigns to cash in on the interest, as TechCrunch wrote last month.

As for the project itself, Telegram is aiming to develop a series of services alongside its messaging app, including:

Distributed file storage akin to services like Dropcoin and ICO company Filecoin
A proxy service for creating decentralized VPN services and TOR-like secure browsing environments based on the blockchain
Services for decentralized apps, smart contracts and decentralized web browsing experiences
Payments for micropayments and peer-to-peer transactions
An early ‘MVP’ version of TON is scheduled for release in Q2 2018 with the Telegram wallet service penciled for the final quarter of the year. Beyond that, its TON services are planned to launch in 2019 but Telegram is still to develop the underlying technology that it claims will enable them.

Despite that, it has been busy shipping new products this year.

Earlier this month, Telegram introduced new versions of its messaging apps for Android and iOS, although its apps were briefly removed for download by Apple after some users were found to be sharing child pornography on them. The company also released a web plug-in allowing businesses to connect with users via the messaging app.

Comments

How ad-free subscriptions could solve Facebook

At the core of Facebook’s “well-being” problem is that its business is directly coupled with total time spent on its apps. The more hours you pass on the social network, the more ads you see and click, the more money it earns. That puts its plan to make using Facebook healthier at odds with its finances, restricting how far it’s willing to go to protect us from the harms of over use. The advertising-supported model comes with some big benefits, though. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has repeatedly said that “We will always keep Facebook a free service for everyone.” Ads lets Facebook remain free for those who don’t want to pay, and more importantly, for those around the world who couldn’t afford to. Ads pay for Facebook to keep the lights on, research and develop new technologies, and profit handsomely in a way that attracts top talent and further investment. More affluent users with more buying power in markets like the US, UK, and Canada command higher ad prices, effectively...

Here’s how to keep track of Elon Musk’s Roadster and Starman in space

Elon Musk’s Starman, the mannequin driver of the Tesla Roadster SpaceX launched aboard its Falcon Heavy rocket, is taking a trip around our solar system, in a large elliptical orbit that will bring him relatively close to Mars, the Sun and other heavenly bodies. But how to track the trip, now that the Roadster’s onboard batteries are out of juice and no longer transmitting live footage? Thanks to the work of Ben Pearson, a SpaceX fan and electrical engineer working in the aerospace industry, who created ‘Where is Roadster,’ a website that makes use of JPL Horizons data to track the progress of the Roadster and Starman through space, and to predict its path and let you know when it’ll come close to meeting up with various planets and the Sun. The website tells you the Roadster’s current position, too, as well as its speed and whether it’s moving towards or away from Earth and Mars at any given moment. It’s not officially affiliated with SpaceX or Tesla, but it is something Elon...

Engineering against all odds, or how NYC’s subway will get wireless in the tunnels

Never ask a wireless engineer working on the NYC subway system “What can go wrong?” Flooding, ice, brake dust, and power outages relentlessly attack the network components. Rats — many, many rats — can eat power and fiber optic cables and bring down the whole system. Humans are no different, as their curiosity or malice strikes a blow against wireless hardware (literally and metaphorically). Serverless software deployment to the cloud, this is not. New York City officially got wireless service in every underground subway station a little more than a year ago, and I was curious what work went into the buildout of this system as well as how it will expand in the future. That curiosity is part of a series of articles I’ve written on an observed pattern known as cost disease, the massively inflating costs of basic human services like health care, housing, infrastructure, and education. The United States spends trillions of dollars on each of these fields, massively outspending sim...

South Korea aims for startup gold

Back in 2011, when South Korea won its longshot bid to host the 2018 Winter Olympics, the country wasn’t widely recognized as a destination for ski and snow lovers. It wasn’t considered much of a tech startup hub either. Fast forward seven years and a lot has changed. For the next 10 days, the eyes of the world will be on the snowy slopes of PyeongChang. Meanwhile, a couple of hours away in Seoul, a burgeoning startup scene is seeing investments multiply, generating exits and even creating a unicorn or two. While South Korea doesn’t get a perfect score as a startup innovation hub, it has established itself as a serious contender. More than half a billion dollars annually has gone to seed through late-stage funding rounds for the past few years. During that time, at least two companies, e-commerce company Coupang and mobile-focused content and commerce company Yello Mobile, have established multi-billion-dollar valuations. To provide a broader picture of how South Korea stacks ...

The CC Aurora is actually pretty fun, as far as projectors go

I don’t review projectors. Projectors are boring. Even the good ones. They remind me of vacation slideshows and the film strips we had to watch in health class — neither of which I’m in a particular hurry to revisit in my adult life. That said, I’ve always harbored some germ of a notion that some day I might buy one, to compensate for being one of those weirdos without a TV set. There’s something undeniably appealing about a big screen TV you can break out during movie night and then stash back into the closest of your one-bedroom New York City apartment. XGIMI’s CC Aurora is the closest I’ve seen to fitting the bill — or, for that matter, being a projector that I could actually muster any reasonable amount of excitement about. From the looks of it, it’s kind of the perfect package for the apartment dweller: it’s compact, self-contained with a built-in speaker system and plays nicely with mobile devices. Clearly I’m not alone here, either. The product scored $170,000 on Indi...

Exciting Technology

Search This Blog