All you need to know about the future Telegram messenger crypto currency

The forthcoming ICO Telegram can become a turning point for the entire crypto-currency industry and at the same time save the company. We tell what the success of one of the most anticipated primary placements depends on.

In 2013, the brothers Pavel and Nikolai Durov founded Telegram, but so far they have not been able to convincingly monetize their popular messenger. Large annual operating costs (in 2017 they amounted to $ 70 million) absorbed the bulk of the personal fortune of the brothers - the only source of funding for the project.
If successful, the forthcoming sale of digital tokens, called "grammes" (gram), will allow the company to attract about $ 1.2 billion. If, in time, tokens become more expensive, Telegram will receive a reliable source of financing, retaining 52% of the 5 billion issued tokens.
Of course, the success of ICO depends on many factors.
The most ambitious placement of coins in history is aimed at financing the development of the Telegram Open Network. Tokens will allow you to make cheap payments in real time and eventually become the basis of a single platform for decentralized identification, storage, and so on.
While some fund managers are enthusiastically looking forward to ICO (an estimated 200 million people use the Telegram application), others are skeptical of its prospects. Evgeny Vigovsky, the operating director of the crypto-depositary Saifu, who is also preparing for the ICO, and a former employee of Kaspersky Lab, says:

"It will not be easy to create the appropriate infrastructure. In my opinion, they are trying to aim at something they do not quite understand. "

First of all, it should be noted that an alpha version of the future project is not ready yet. In addition, the company's approach to encryption has long been questioned by experts who are concerned about vulnerabilities in its technologies, Vigovsky said. However, Telegram in the past denied all claims about possible vulnerabilities. Vigorsky says:

"The safety of the new project raises doubts."

It is also important that the ICO prospectus does not comment on the high percentage of tokens assigned to the company.

Reserve

It's not unusual for startups to keep part of the token for later use. The idea is that the project will prove its worth, the tokens will become more expensive in the secondary market and will serve as an additional source of financing for the company's development.
In some cases, the management of these reserve funds is transferred to the hands of independent funds, as with ICO Telegram.
From the issue prospectus it follows that the management of the backup tokens will be transferred to the non-commercial foundation TON, and it will be responsible for the further sale of grams as the platform develops.
Telegram employees will receive 4% of tokens as an incentive for further work on the project (theoretically, their efforts should contribute to the growth of the cost of tokens).
The TON Foundation intends to use a transparent formula for estimating grams: the first token will be sold at $ 0.1, each subsequent will be sold at a price that is one billionth higher than the previous one.
Participants presley will be able to purchase grams at a price of $ 0.308 to $ 600 million. During the public offering, the value will increase as sales follow the above formula. If during the ICO the tokens are successfully placed for another $ 600 million, their average cost will increase to $ 0.969.
The Fund "reserves the right not to sell the remaining tokens, or sell them at a higher price, but never at a lower price (given the uncertainty associated with the rapid change in exchange rates)." Co-founder Turing Capital and expert in the economy of tokens Siddhartha Kalla established that in total Telegram and TON fund will be able to raise about $ 14.7 billion. Calla says:

"The last gram will cost $ 14.84, and the total capitalization of the tokens at that time will be $ 74.21 billion."

But before that it is still far: the project must prove its worth, and the TON platform must be widely disseminated. As Professor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Christian Catalini, "reserves are worth nothing until they are on the market."

Control of Durov

Tokens are designed to ensure a steady flow of funds into the project, but Catalini notes that it is not yet clear whether it will be possible to achieve the goal. In addition, he is concerned about the structure of the platform management.
According to White Paper, "The TON fund will control the majority of votes in the first stage of the deployment of the TON blockade, which is useful in case of adjusting many project parameters or, if necessary, carrying out hard or soft branches."
Nowhere is there a detailed account of the structure of management. Apparently, each gram is equal to one voice. For such a large project, it is especially strange that even the simplest characteristics, such as the governance structure and the voting procedure, remain unclear. Other ICO start-ups usually talk as much as possible about the structure of management, dispute settlement and voting schemes. The TON project is not transparent on all these points.
For an industry that pays great attention to decentralization and transparency, Durov requires investors too much faith in him and the Telegram team, Catalini says:

"I'm more concerned with the management structure, rather than arbitrary parameters, which can later be adjusted by the fund or developers. Investors should assess the ability of the team to fulfill the plan and realize the intended goals, as well as understand what leverage they have in case something goes wrong. "

Catalini believes that it is necessary to get more details about how the collected money will be used outside of daily expenses.
He says: "They must provide detailed information and investment of funds; about how the parameters will be determined, who will manage the fund and how, and so on. "

by Taya Arjanova, Insider Pro