“It isn’t clear what drove the change. One factor might have been that Telegram felt it had raised enough money to avoid a public deal. One person familiar with the company said another reason is that the regulatory environment has changed since the company first started planning the offering. A deal open to any investors, rather than just wealthier, accredited ones, could open up the company’s executives to more scrutiny, a timely concern given the Securities and Exchange Commission’s recent focus on ICOs. Telegram is represented by the law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, which couldn’t be reached for comment.”

Telegram, the ever-growing online messaging app seems to have cut short a recent ICO developed to help assist the company grow their services.The project was called ‘Telegram Open Network’ and the premise of the fundraising was to help ensure Telegrams 200Million customers could continue to use the application for years to come. It transpires that somehow, around $1.7Billion were raised through investment from less than 200 private firms, meaning Telegram really didn’t feel a need to carry on. Or so it seems.As it stands, Telegram are yet to make any official announcements here with regards to what is happening, however some suspicion is starting to arise surrounding both the legitimacy of the money raised and of course, the next steps for the project. By raising such a huge amount of money in such a small space of time, Telegram are exposing themselves to all sorts of probes and investigations. Authorities will be very interested in how much of this money has been declared, where it has come from and of course, what it will be used for. According to the Wall Street Journal:It is of course wise to point out that this is one of the largest initial coin offerings recorded to date, so furthermore, there seems to be even more motivation for authorities to get involved. They hate ICO’s, since this is such a big one, it’s pretty clear that they will want as much involvement as they can get. What next for Telegram? Well, as it stands, they have an incredible amount of funding through which they can develop their application, which is great. Hopefully, they do make the most of this, file the finances legitimately and then go on to roll out new updates to their system, rollouts that will benefit their customers.Assuming all is legitimate here, this is a great demonstration of the power of cryptocurrencies and initial coin offerings. Love them or hate them, you can’t deny that Telegram have done well here.