The Wall Street Journal reported Telegram has raised $1.7 billion in anticipation of an initial coin offering (ICO). However, the company has instead decided to scrap its much publicized ICO in favor of beefing up its popular messaging service and expanding into tokenization.
Also read: Microsociety Fort Galt in Chile Uses Bitcoin to Build Anew
Telegram Scraps ICO
Paul Vigna details how Telegram has “brought in so much money from a small group of private investors that it is calling off a planned sale of cryptocurrency to the wider investing public.” The company is effectively ditching its ICO after having raised a cool $1.7 billion.
It’s an interesting time for Telegram, to put it mildly. Recently, the encrypted messenger service celebrated gaining 200 million users. Almost immediately, the Russian government attempted to force it to provide user information, and a way to backdoor decrypt, in an effort to combat terrorism. Pavel Durov, Telegram’s charismatic founder, flatly refused, pulling lawyers from the determinative Moscow hearing. Soon after, the service was summarily banned throughout Russia.
An eventful few weeks for Telegram included colorful protests over Russia’s ban of the encrypted messaging service.
That, in turn, set off a wave of protests, including supporters in the country flying paper airplanes (the company’s logo) as a symbol of resistance. Even Mr. Durov openly engaged in the fight, using his personal channel to suggest ways to hack around the ban. If all that wasn’t enough, Telegram’s European services ghosted for most of the continent a few days ago, and sporadically throughout the rest of the world, causing major disruptions.
Perhaps then it’s no wonder Mr. Durov is looking not to explore the ICO realm further but will instead use that newly raised cash
