Inside Telegram’s ambitious $1.2B ICO to create the next Ethereum

The billion dollar ICO of the Telegram has reached the first milestone by collecting $ 850 million in pre-sale stages

Money collected according to a document presented to the US Capital Markets Board will be used for 'TON Blockchain's development, Telegram Messenger maintenance and development and other purposes'.

Targeting venture capital firms and important names in the investment community, this ICO has offered big discounts for investors to buy Gram token in pre-sales telegram. According to Bloomberg's report, these discounts seem to have worked. The Telegram, which initially targeted $ 600 million, has collected $ 850 million thanks to the fact that it is more of a demand.

According to Tech Crunch, Telegram planned a $ 600 million addition to public sales in March to improve the TON project. However, this amount may vary with the amount collected before the sale.

This sale also represents Telegram's first foreign investment. Pavol Durov, founder of VKontakte, known as 'Russia's Facebook', and his brother Nikolai, separated from investors who said they were tied to the state and founded Telegram. The Durov brothers have been financing the Telegram since they were founded.

Thanks to the relationship of Telegram with the crypto community, this token sale was met with unprecedented interest. Telegram Messenger is used in many ICO projects. The group feature is very popular for investors following crypto money.

According to the latest Quartz news, some investors have already begun to sell tokens, which they have received in the pre-sale phase, a low price. On the other hand, fraudsters sell ICOs with many fake Telegrams to make money using extraordinary interest.

The TON project, which is the center of this interest, aims to develop many new services beyond message implementation:

• Distributed file storage similar to Dropcoin and Filecon service
• Proxy service to create secure TOR-like browser environments based on decentralized VPN and blockchain technology
• Services for decentralized applications, web experience and smart contracts
• Payment system for P2P transactions and micropayments

While the MVP version of TON was planned for the second quarter of this year, the Telegram wallet service was left in the last quarter. Beyond that, the Telegram stated that the technology behind the other TON services will still be in operation in 2019 because it is still in development.

Product roadmap

Plenty of ICOs are rightly accused of trading on hype and developing multi-billion dollar market caps for their coins without actually offering a product.Telegram’s token sale will take place before the company’s product is available, but the tokens themselves will be released after a number of features according to the company’s rough guideline as shared with investors:

• Q1 2018 — secure ID launch
• Q2 2018 — MVP of test of network of TON
• Q3 2018 — testing and security audit for TON
• Q4 2018 — stable version of TON deployed
• Q4 2018 — Telegram wallet launched
• Q1 2019 — TON-based economy goes live inside Telegram
• Q2 2019 — TON services, storage and proxy launched

By 2021, Telegram plans to step back and rename TON to ON with the network managed by its foundation. That’s not an entirely uncommon goal for token sale projects.“Telegram will serve as a launch pad for TON, ensuring its technological superiority and widespread adoption on the initial stages, but the future of TON is in the hands of the global open-source community,” the company wrote in the whitepaper.