Telegram attracted $ 850 million
Messenger Telegram allegedly successfully completed the first part of its crowbanding campaign, collecting $ 850 million, according to a document published on the website of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
It says that the money was collected "for the development of the TON block, the development and support of Telegram Messenger and other purposes." The security offered for purchase is described as an "agreement for the purchase of a crypto-currency", and the document itself was signed by Pavel Durov.
The value indicated in the document corresponds to the amount that Telegram intended to attract during the preselection of its ICO with the participation of venture capital firms and leaders of the investment community. Initially, the organizers were going to limit $ 600 million, but the rush caused them to raise the bar to $ 850 million, reports Bloomberg.
According to TechCrunch, Telegram intends to collect another $ 600 million in March during the public sale of tokens. Whether this value is also changed is not yet known. Bloomberg previously assumed that the second part of the campaign could be expanded to $ 1.15 billion. Thus, the total amount of funds raised could reach $ 2 billion.
In any case, even at the preselection stage, ICO Telegram already surpasses all the campaigns held in the industry before.
The sale of tokens is the first case of attracting telegram messenger capital from outside. Up to this point, the development of the project was conducted at the expense of Pavel and Nikolai Durov.
Earlier Vedomosti reported that investors lucky to get into pre-ICO Telegram resell their shares with a surcharge, while Bloomberg wrote that experienced players refuse to offer a messenger. The popularity of this ICO and the lack of official information led to the spread of a huge number of fraudulent schemes, the organizers of which, under all sorts of pretexts, invited investors to invest their money in the TON platform, while not having anything to do with it.
The least viable TON product should appear in the second quarter of this year, while a full-scale launch of the platform will take place only next year.