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Telegram is finally going on sale to the public.
However, this time, Telegram is adopting the lEO model, which is listed on the cryptocurrency exchange Liquid and issued in limited quantities to users in limited countries.
According to Liquid's official information, the instant messaging application Telegram token GRAM will be exclusively launched on the cryptocurrency exchange Liquid at 8:00 am (UTC time) on July 10.
As the exclusive launch platform, Liquid will also transfer a series of benefits to platform users. Users who hold the Liquid platform currency QASH will receive more discounts. The more QASH the platform currency holds, the greater the discount.
Interestingly, this public offering does not seem to have directly reached an agreement with the official Telegram, but was initiated by one of the largest private equity buyers in Asia.
Relevant information on the crypto exchange Liquid page shows that the organizer of this token sale is Gram Asia’s largest holder, an organization from South Korea called Gram Asia. This is the first limited release of GRAM to the public. Users can use US dollars and USDC to subscribe for GRAM, but it is not open to users in the United States, Japan and Canada.
It is not yet clear the sale price and specific quantity of the token Gram, but according to the private placement price, it should not be lower than $1.37.
“And Liquid was chosen because it is a compliant exchange that protects users,” added Gram Asia founder Dongbeom Kim.
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The chaotic and out-of-control secondary market and Li Gui scam
Indeed, compliance is very important, especially for the chaotic cryptocurrency industry, and Telegram, which belongs to the top star project in this industry, broke the blockchain financing record in 2018.
Telegram is the blockchain project that has raised the most funds in history. With the support of top investors, it has attracted much attention. After the cancellation of the originally planned public sale, retail investors are more "hungry" and want to get on the car. Get a piece of it.
Where there is demand, there is a market, which provides opportunities for scammers, and the scene was once out of control: the prosperity and sell-off of the secondary market, counterfeit Li Gui website and scams, many people were deceived, making this high-profile project tainted and questioned.
Launched in 2013 by the Durov brothers, Telegram is known for its privacy and security, free from government censorship and surveillance.
In January and March 2018, Telegram successfully raised US$1.7 billion through two rounds of financing respectively, with the participation of top venture capital and international investment institutions including Sequoia Capital, Benchmark, and KPCB.
According to the original white paper plan, it was planned to sell 600 million US dollars to private investors and the public, raising a total of 1.2 billion US dollars.
However, with the bull market in the cryptocurrency market in the first half of 2018, this quota was completed ahead of schedule and exceeded. Moreover, in order to avoid the legal problems brought about by the US SEC’s supervision of ICO projects, in April 2018, Telegram made a bold decision to announce the cancellation of the ICO for the public.
The most direct result of the cancellation of ICO is that ordinary people can no longer invest in this token.
However, for projects with a lot of money, scams are never absent.
As the largest cryptocurrency community gathering place, the point-to-point encrypted instant chat application Telegram has inherent advantages in entering the blockchain field, coupled with the endorsement of top investors, the halo blessings such as the largest fundraising project in history, leading to the public's expectations and expectations for Telegram. The demand turned out to be very strong.
How strong was the demand?
You can see a thing or two by looking at the various Li Gui websites and scams created for "needs".On February 28, 2018, a company called Telegram Open Network Limited was registered in the United Kingdom under the name of Telegram founder Pavel Durov, saying thatPaid-in capital
1.13 billion US dollars, and was later slapped in the face by Telegram's official Twitter, saying that it was a complete liar.
In addition, a series of Telegram Li Gui websites have also been launched one after another. According to Coindesk’s statistics, as of March 2018, there have been at least nine websites that used the name of Telegram ICO to fraudulently raise funds.
One of the standouts is a website with the domain name Gramtoken.io. In just two weeks, more than $5 million in assets were defrauded. In order to gain the conviction of investors, it copied and pasted a large amount of content in the official white paper, including the project roadmap and team members, which seemed to be genuine.
Another fraudulent website with the domain name Ton-gram.io, the relevant wallet address of its associated website shows that it defrauded $30,000 of Ethereum, and more than 70 people were defrauded.
Faced with these endless Li Gui scams, these investors who blindly sought opportunities to get in the car naturally got nothing and lost their property in vain.
However, there is another way to invest and that is to buy tokens from early investors.
The public's frantic expectations for TON, coupled with the 50% discount on the purchase price of early investors, have given birth to a prosperous TON secondary market. Moreover, there are not a few people who have obtained huge returns from this secondary market.
Such transactions are not uncommon. Many early investors in TON sold goods at different prices in the secondary market to cash out, and there are also brokers who specialize in buying and selling transactions, and they also make a lot of money from it.
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Cash out again
Although the cancellation of the public-facing ICO avoids regulatory scrutiny and pressure, the road behind Telegram is not going smoothly.
Faced with the secondary market, the situation was out of control for a while.
According to a source who told TechCrunch, Telegram officials were aware of this, but they took no action and the officials did not come forward because the current legal regulation in the cryptocurrency market is in an ambiguous state. gray area.
Interestingly, Gram was recently listed on the exchange Liquid and issued to the limited public for the first time in the IEO model. It is still not an official shipment, but organized by Gram Asia, the largest private equity buyer in Asia.
This can't help but make people suspicious, maybe this is another time for buyers in the secondary market to cash out?
According to the official announcement, the Gram Token will be officially launched and distributed on October 31, 2019. After the launch of TON Network, the Gram tokens sold in this round will be unlocked and distributed to investors within the next 18 months.
The unlocking of Gram is divided into 4 stages: 25% will be released 3 months after the launch of the TON network, 25% will be released after 6 months, 25% will be released after 12 months, and 25% will be released after 18 months.
Then, before the full listing in October, it is indeed a good deal for private equity buyers to ship and cash out.
According to a Cointelegraph report, a Telegram source questioned the IEO, “Liquid’s sale of Gram tokens has nothing to do with the official.”
"It's not like that," said Liquid CEO Kayamori, declaring that it was part of the official plan.
“It’s really an official mandate from Telegram, and it’s been planned from the beginning,” Kayamori told TechCrunch in an interview this week.
"Public sale has always been planned. According to the official roadmap, TON plans to be officially listed in October this year. After the launch of the test network and before the launch of the main network, Gram Asia will sell to some of the public in this way. Part of the overall strategy. They want to work with compliant exchanges to test the situation before it goes fully live.”
Obviously, this is a very strange phenomenon. Even in the "nothing is impossible" currency circle, it is usually common practice to get official endorsements when selling tokens.
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Increasing regulatory pressure
For blockchain and cryptocurrency, an open and free market sounds good, but the other side of the coin is that the lack of supervision and the vagueness of the current legal definition lead to an extremely chaotic environment in the cryptocurrency market. situation.
Because of this, this encryption project, which is loved by thousands of people, once had a prosperous secondary market and many Li Gui scams, which led to chaos out of control.
With the recent gradual tightening of the US SEC's supervision of cryptocurrencies, it has also brought considerable pressure to these projects.
On June 4, 2019, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced the prosecution of Kik, a Canadian cryptocurrency company, accusing it of selling unregistered securities worth hundreds of millions of dollars through ICO in 2017, arguing that "Kik has deprived investors of legal right to know and prevent investors from making informed investment decisions.”
According to a court document released by the SEC, the U.S. SEC believes that the instant messaging app Kik raised more than $55 million from U.S. investors through an ICO in 2017 after it ran out of funds, saying that "the current transaction of the Kin token The price was half of what public investors were paying for it at the time.”
Does this sound familiar?
That's right, when Telegram entered the blockchain and issued coins, it was also questioned that it was using the blockchain concept to issue coins to make up for Telegram's financial deficit.
Focused on privacy and independence, Telegram is one of the most popular instant messaging apps with 200 million active users and 70 billion daily messages sent.
Although Telegram has tens of millions of users, it has no business model because the founders believe that "fast and secure messaging is also 100% free.
Telegram has advertised that it has no intention of making a profit, will never sell advertising, will not accept outside investment, and will not be acquired.
However, mounting costs put heavy financial pressure on the team.
According to CRV venture capitalists Justine Moore and Olivia Moore, in 2017, Telegram lost $70 million in server fees, user verification, security and employee salaries. In this regard, the official stated that if there is a problem of insufficient funds, it will Consider including a moderate amount of paid features in the product to cover infrastructure development and developer salaries.
In the second half of 2017, under the hot wind of blockchain and ICO, Telegram announced that it would launch TON in 2018, a "fast, scalable and user-friendly" blockchain network.
It is conceivable how much pressure Telegram was under after the US SEC sued Kik. Even if there is a private equity buyer who sells and cashes out, the official will not come forward. It is best not to be involved in legal disputes to avoid getting into the same trouble as Kik.
In fact, Kik's prosecution by the US SEC is not the only event that reflects the gradual tightening of the US SEC's regulatory pressure.
On June 11, the US cryptocurrency exchange Bittrex officially announced that starting from June 21, it will no longer provide US users with 32 cryptocurrencies including QTUM, GTO, DNT, STORJ, FCT, etc. The international platform Bittrex Users in International and other countries will not be affected.
The delisting can be regarded as a major move by the US SEC against the cryptocurrency securities management law. These banned tokens are suspected of being securities by the SEC, indicating that US encryption exchanges are facing considerable regulatory pressure.
In fact, as early as the end of May this year, the encryption exchange Poloniex also took similar measures to disable 9 cryptocurrencies for users in the United States.
In addition, the Binance decentralized exchange Binance DEX also recently announced that it will implement "Geo Blocking" for users in 29 countries and regions including the United States at 12:00 UTC on July 1st. Alternatives to holding and managing assets are still available via VPN or using wallets that already support the Binance Chain (BNB) mainnet.
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question
question
Telegram, which is blessed by stars and endorsed by top investors, still faces many doubts.
Although the traffic is huge, there are still many people who are not optimistic about the tokens it issued, questioning the feasibility of its underlying technology, and the overvaluation of the project.
According to the official plan, Telegram Open Network aims to combine the blockchain through Telegram to build a decentralized application ecosystem including TON storage, TON App Store service, TON DNS and TON payment on the basis of chat tools. The integration of these functions can meet the daily needs of most people. You only need to install a Telegram, from communication to payment, from Internet access to entertainment. The decentralized blockchain can meet all the needs for privacy.
Analysts at cryptocurrency fund Pantera Capital believe that Telegram's white paper is particularly weak in explaining the underlying technology, and whether the platform can be successfully developed is a problem.
Another point of view is that the valuation of 1.7 billion U.S. dollars in a short period of time, as high as 200 billion U.S. dollars, is too high, and the valuation alone cannot support this valuation.
What is the concept of financing 1.7 billion US dollars?
It took Uber five years to raise $1 billion, Facebook seven years, and Telegram’s $1.7 billion in just three months.
Even if the project is a good project, the high expectations for the project, coupled with the financing obtained in the bull market itself, lead to an inflated valuation of Telegram.
In March of this year, Lyft, an American online car-hailing company, conducted an IPO at an issue price of US$72, raising US$2.3 billion. Currently, its shares are down 33%.
In addition, according to the documents sent to potential investors, Telegram plans to invest 400 million US dollars in the development of TON, and promises to launch it in October 2019. Once it is overdue, it will refund investors. However, in a separate filing, the company said it could not guarantee they would have sufficient funds to issue refunds.
“Under the terms of the Purchase Agreement, there can be no assurance that the Issuer or Telegram will have sufficient funds to pay any termination amount (as defined in the Purchase Agreement). Neither Telegram nor the Issuer has any fiduciary or other obligation to use the token sale The funds pay for the buyer's benefit..."
This time, Telegram officially announced that it will launch the main network before October 31, which is exactly the deadline promised in the agreement. This coincidence makes people wonder whether the project progress is really completed on schedule, or is it to "fulfill" the promise to avoid withdrawal. payment?
This time lEO is essentially an act of selling SAFT in the secondary market.
SAFT stands for "Agreement for Future Tokens". According to the terms of SAFT, the seller promises to hand over the tokens to the buyer at an agreed price on a future date, which is equivalent to a futures contract.
Legally speaking, it is illegal for SAFTs to be sold in the secondary market. Although illegal, this model is a "smart" marketing method.
For the project side, it seems that there is no harm in listing on the exchange in lEO mode to test the market heat and increase the popularity of the project before the full launch. Of course, exchanges are also willing to participate, because it is also a good thing to improve exchange traffic and brand awareness. For private equity buyers, it is also a good deal to earn the price difference by shipping in advance.
Liquid CEO Kayamori is very confident in this lEO sale. Although the number of tokens is not yet determined, if the supply exceeds demand, he will consider increasing the total amount of issuance.
Although it is impossible to confirm whether Telegram’s public sale is officially ordered or another buyer in the secondary market to cash out, what is certain is that if this test proves that there is a market, there may be more early buyers in the future. Shipped this way.
