CRYPTO news 23 02 2018

• Market Cap: $432 181 558 208
• 24h Vol: $20 680 454 522
• BTC Dominance: 39.3%
1)El Petro,

Preliminary sales of the cryptocurrency El Petro, launched by Venezuela, on the first day reached $ 735 million. Who became the investor of this project is still unknown. Although the release of the token was originally planned on the Ethereum platform, now the Blockchain El Petro will be the Chinese NEM platform.

President of Venezuela Nicholas Maduro has already stated that Venezuelan companies PDVSA, Pequiven and CVG should make part of their transactions in the national cryptocurrency. It will also be able to pay tourists.

Under the order of Maduro, 100 million El Petro tokens, provided with Venezuelan oil at the rate of one token per barrel, will be produced. The main goal of creating its own cryptocurrency is to circumvent the economic sanctions imposed by the United States.

2)Tezos Co-Founder : Platform Will Soon Be Launched.

Kathleen Breitman, the co-founder of the self-governing Blockchain protocol Tezos, has promised to “go rogue” and launch the platform in several weeks, despite ongoing lawsuits plaguing the project. The announcement took place during the UCLA Blockchain Lab's Cyber Days conference Feb. 17-18.

Tezos raised a record-breaking $232 mln during its Initial Coin Offering (ICO) in July 2017. The project has since been a subject of scrutiny and multiple lawsuits over the question of its compliance with the U.S. (SEC) regulations, among other things.

It is alleged that the tokens sold to US investors during Tezos’ ICO were actually securities. Since the company has not registered them with the SEC, this would constitute securities fraud.

However, at a UCLA conference which took place last weekend, Kathleen Breitman promised to “[go] rogue in the next few weeks” and release the “tezzies” tokens (XTZ) on their own terms, despite legal troubles. “Things needed to move forward. It’s unfair, but we need to ship the code,” Breitman added.

Notably, Tezos is managed separately, with Kathleen Breitman and her husband and co-founder Arthur Breitman controlling the project’s source code, and the Tezos Foundation controlling all the funds collected during the ICO.
3)Anonymous Sources: Telegram Launches ‘Secret’ Second Presale

Encrypted messenger service Telegram is raising a further $850 mln in a “secret second presale” of its TON token before launching the yet to be officially announced world’s biggest ICO.

As Verge reports citing “exclusive” reports from four anonymous sources, platform is attempting to get accredited investors on board to double the $850 mln it already received in the ‘first’ presale.

In total, Telegram stands to raise around $1.6 bln before its TON token sale becomes publicly available.

The figures mean this ICO easily beats any other token offering in terms of USD value, with Block.One's $700 mln result from 2017 coming a lonely second.

Telegram’s path to capital has already seen difficulties due to its increasingly prominent public profile. Fake ‘versions’ of the ICO which appeared on social media following the original announcement in January managed to illicitly accrue funds for TON tokens that did not yet exist.

Controversy centered even on documentation, with a white paper for TON attracting mixed reviews regarding its authenticity when it leaked online.

Durov himself had also publicly come out warning of individual scams linked to the ICO.

more to come...:)