United States
United Kingdom
A week before, we had reported that messenger application Telegram is planning to launch its own crypto currency named ‘Gram’. Finance Magnates has provided additional details of the planned ICO. To offer a never seen before variety of services, Telegram is planning to come up with a $500 million ICO. It is double the amount raised by Filecoin.
The block chain platform of Telegram will be called as Telegram Open Network or TON, according to the leaked white paper. It will be integrated with the prevailing messaging platform. The native currency of the platform will be known as ‘Gram’. Telegram plans to resolve the limitations faced by other block chain networks.
According to the white paper, TON will be a third-generation block chain network, with scalability. TON will use a proof-of-stake as its consensus mechanism. It will also have a support for hypercube routing and sharding. That will enable the network to handle millions of transactions per second. The developers are also planning a multi-layer approach to avoid future forks on the network.
Telegram plans to introduce five new services, namely TON Storage, TON Proxy, TON Services, TON DNS, and TON Payments. TON Storage will function as Dropbox, allowing users to store data in a decentralized manner. TON Proxy will provide anonymity to the user. TON DNS will interpret machine language representing account names, network nodes, smart contracts and services to readable format.
Third-party apps and services will be allowed on top of the TON Services. Once TON goes live, users will be able to make instant payments using Gram token. That would make global remittance simple and secure.
Telegram has plans to issue 5 billion Grams. To prevent speculative trading and ensure flexibility, the company will retain at least 52% of the tokens. Nearly 4% of the issued tokens (200 million Grams) will be reserved for the development team with a compulsory holding period of 4 years. Telegram intends to offer 44% of 2.2 billion Grams through the ICO and private offerings.
The planned services are expected to go live in the first half of 2019. In the first-quarter of this year, Telegram External Secure ID will be rolled out. It will be followed by an MVT network of TON. Telegram wallet will be made available for public use by the end of 2018. By the first quarter of next year, the company hopes to establish a TON-based economy within the platform.
About 80% of the raised funds will be used for purchasing equipments, bandwidth, and user verification costs. The rest will be set aside for wages, offices, and other legal expenses. The company expects the budget to reach $220 million in 2020. Last year, Telegrams’ budget was $70 million. Telegram hopes to attract 1 billion users by 2022.
Industry experts believe that the market cap of Telegram at the time of launching will be between $3 billion and $5 billion. The token sale will be conducted against fiat currencies, rather than Bitcoin or Ethereum, to attract more investors. This is going to be first time an established firm, with millions of users, is going to file an ICO. Thus, it may be another success story in the making.
