Telegram ICO: the shape of things to come?



The popular encrypted messaging app has raised $850 million.

The landscape of ICOs is changing fast. Only a year or two back, projects might expect to raise a few million dollars at most from a large number of crypto investors around the world. In 2017, we saw the scale change, as (predominantly Ether) whales bought up large amounts of tokens as soon as ICOs opened, closing them out at their hard caps of tens of millions of dollars in a matter of minutes and sometimes less. A few open-ended ICOs raised nine-figure amounts. But even those pale in comparison to Telegram’s offering, which has already picked up $850 million.

Telegram’s pre-ICO targeted venture capital firms and wealthy individuals, rather than the traditional crypto crowd. In due course, they may get a look in, though without the hefty discounts given to the large investors. But even in a $1-2 billion ICO, the crowd is an afterthought for the ‘crowdsale’.

The idea is to create a stack of different services for Telegram, including micropayments, file storage and secure browsing, based on the blockchain. It would admittedly be pretty amazing to integrate all this into such a widely-used app. However, the white paper and ICO itself have come under fire for their vague articulation of the tech and hype over working software; one recent Forbes article was extremely critical of the scale and substance of the project, listing a series of experts who viewed it all as highly speculative and uncertain at best. Plus there’s some negative press about early buyers flipping their tokens (or rather, the right to their tokens, since they haven’t yet been created) for massive profit – a kind of derivatives market.

All the same, Telegram’s ICO signals one direction that token sales are taking. Alongside a trend towards greater compliance, ICOs are ballooning, becoming a way for big companies to raise seriously big money. In the process, they’re also becoming more exclusive, targeting larger investors with big discounts and leaving the scraps to the little fishes.





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