Telegram Looking To Rival Ethereum With Hugely Ambitious $1.2 Billion ICO

Telegram is already i of the well-nigh popular (and secure) messaging platforms. But, the company is not content with serving but that one purpose for the consumers. It's excited about the prospects of stepping pes into the blockchain ecosystem.

Thanks to documents detailing the project, information technology has practically been confirmed that Telegram has anew establish appetite to build its own blockchain platform and cryptocurrency to take on existing cryptos. And what's better than a ten-effigy initial money offering (ICO) to kickstart this proposed project, own't information technology?

Telegram ICO Plans

The messaging giant'southward proposed blockchain project has been aptly-named TON (Telegram Open Network), a whitepaper and investor prospectus for which is already making rounds of the Internet. It states that Telegram is looking frontward to a tape-breaking ICO and raising a whopping $1.2 billion through its TON token sale.

Annotation : ICO, for those unaware, is known as Initial Money Offer, and can be seen as a parallel to an Initial Public Offering (IPO), to allow you purchase a company'south tokens when it's looking to raise money. ICOs are commonly held in the early on phase, different IPOs which are for established companies.

This token sale has been broken down into 2 stages, where the company plans to heighten $600 million in a pre-auction event scheduled for adjacent month and the other half in a public sale subsequently in March 2018. The pre-sale investors will too be offered a 68% discount as compared to the public.

The former auction result will exist a private invite-only session, that'd see participation from top executives and traditional venture capitalists (VCs). Whereas the latter is going to welcome retail investors, giving you lot a chance to jump on the hype train too.

If everything goes to plan, information technology'll exist the largest ICO ever. Telegram would overtake Filecoin, a network of decentralized deject storage providers, which raised around $257 million in its ICO in September terminal year.

Building The Platform

The white paper further details that Telegram is going to build its blockchain platform, that will also result in the creation of a cryptocurrency, from scratch. Yeah, from the ground up.

While virtually other tech giants are relying on decentralized platforms similar Ethereum to build their cryptocurrency offerings, Telegram is not taking the beaten down path. The visitor is looking to create a blockchain platform of its own to rival Ethereum instead. Information technology plans on edifice out a decentralized Internet with the blockchain blocks that it will create, leading others to build apps using the aforementioned.

Telegram is looking to build TON as a component that'll come in handy for the creation of decentralized apps and services. It will somewhen be made available to developers, which volition make the TON platform equally the gateway to a slew of upcoming blockchain-based apps. This has been described in the white papers as under:

TON blockchains aim to be able to "automatically split up and merge to accommodate changes in load". This would mean new blocks are generated quickly and "the absence of long queues helps continue transaction costs low, fifty-fifty if some of the services using the platform become massively popular"

What's The ICO For?

Much like several other messaging platforms, Telegram is not looking to make its service paid for the consumers. But, the visitor picked up on the fact that its platform is existence used the nearly for crypto-related discussions, thank you to its secure and individual nature. Thus, it plans to launch TON and go ahead with its ICO, fueling the huge hype effectually its cryptocurrency. Talking almost the same, the white paper says,

"More than fourscore percent of collected funds will be spent on equipment, bandwidth, colocation, and user verification costs. The rest will be allocated for wages, offices, and legal and consulting services."

And then, the entire $1.2 billion majuscule that is expected to be raised volition be used for the development of the Telegram Open Network (TON). Information technology can exist seen as the trendy new manner to monetize the platform, where investors will receive TON tokens or and then-called GRAMS, for investing into the upcoming blockchain services. Still, information technology wouldn't have a listing on any public exchanges until 2019.

At present, all that's left to witness is whether Telegram's ICO volition exist every bit triumphant every bit the hype surrounding information technology? What are your opinions on the company'south blockchain plans? Allow us know in the comments below.