ICOs are back!

The Initial Coin Offering fever is a phenomena that started last year and it seems to get consolidated in 2018, this time getting bigger and better with names like the encrypted messaging app Telegram.  This new way to crowdfund projects and enterprises is the most revolutionary source of capitalization since the creation of the bonds, but this time is in the hands of almost anyone who have certain knowledge about Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. 

Telegram, The King

The russian private messaging startup is planning to launch what they called a "Third Generation Blockchain", the Telegram Open Network (TON) is going to be the platform for an encrypted decentralized messaging with its own native cryptocurrency, a wallet for fiat and crypto, plus all the developer tools to build third party applications. 

The 180 million users chat app might become the biggest ecosystem for communications and money transactions in the world.  With a native crypto token that will be called "GRAM", which promise massive adoption due to the worldwide usage of the app, and be expected to rise from $3 to 5$ billion during the ICO. It is said the pre-sale of it is being conducted in buy-in packages of $20 million and for VIP only.  This could be the greatest crypto crowdfund to date, surpassing the record-high $700 million of Block.one last year.

Third Generation Blockchain

Telegram's approach it is said to be a balanced combination of centralize and decentralize model for its infrastructure, to avoid scalability problems and geopolitical restrictions among others. TechCrunch has summarize the White Paper Roadmap in 4 stages as follows:

TON Services” will be a platform for third-party services of any kind that enables smartphone like friendly interfaces for decentralized apps and smart contracts.

“TON DNS” is a service for assigning human-readable names to accounts, smart contracts services and network nodes. With TON DNS, accessing decentralized services could be like “viewing a website on the World Wide Web.”

“TON Payments” is a platform for micropayments and a micropayment channel network. It aims to be used for “instant off-chain value transfers between users bots and other services”. Safeguards built into the system are designed to ensure that these transfers “are as secure as on-chain transactions”.

The “TON Blockchain” will consist of a master chain and 2-to-the-power-of-92 accompanying blockchains. Its most notable aspect is that it will have an “Infinite Sharding Paradigm” to achieve scalability. Thus, TON blockchains aim to be able to “automatically split and merge to accommodate changes in load”. This would mean new blocks are generated quickly and “the absence of long queues helps keep transaction costs low, even if some of the services using the platform become massively popular”.

The Telegram Open Network will be based on a dynamic Proof of Stake secured by multiple parties, which a less energy-hogging way of mining and set to have a high degree of fault tolerance. It will also have features like storage of ID, Smart Contracts and Payments system. 

This might be the dawn of a massive global platform as big as Google or Facebook, surrounded by crypto and blockchain. We still do not know when the ICO will be but is rumored to be as soon as in March of this year. Buckle up for this one, because we all want to be part of it! What an awesome time to be alive!

Thank you for reading.

Cheers!