Messenger service Telegram is going to hold the largest initial coin offering (ICO) in the history, the reports TechCrunch, citing trusted sources. Telegram intends to raise $500 million in pre-sale tokens, and during the ICO, the company plans to raise from $3 billion to $5 billion, writes TechCrunch. These figures, as the publication specifies, are preliminary. The ICO may be held in March.
According to the source, ICO's goal is to raise funds for the creation of its own blockchain platform and cryptocurrency. The latter will allow the company to be independent of governments or banks.
The new cryptocurrency might be called Gram, and the blockchain network will be Telegram Open Network.
As part of the pre-sale, investors, who are not part of the inner circle of the Telegram creator Pavel Durov, are required to invest at least $20 million. Unlike most ICOs, those wishing to participate in the ICO will have to invest in fiat currencies (for example, US dollars) rather than cryptocurrencies.
The experts predict that the token sale will be in demand – after all, unlike many startups, with varying degrees of ICO success, we are talking here about a popular messenger that has already proved its capability.
Pavel Durov founded telegram in 2013. The messenger is considered one of the safest in the world. During its existence, Telegram was repeatedly intimidated on the territory of Russia for refusing to give Russian security services encryption keys from user messages. Durov declared that he would never cooperate with the authorities and would struggle for the secrecy of correspondence, even if it would lead to the blocking of the messenger. Meanwhile, the well-known designer Artemy Lebedev believes that the Telegram project is actually backed by Russian special services. He wrote about this yesterday in his Telegram-channel.