I haven't read much at all about the particulars as far as Telegrams ICO goes. Generally, though, I'd point out that the total sum invested in an ICO doesn't ne

I haven't read much at all about the particulars as far as Telegrams ICO goes. Generally, though, I'd point out that the total sum invested in an ICO doesn't necessarily equal the sum available to the company issuing the coin. Usually, as I understand it, the ICO issuer will hold some of the coins, and sell some of them, and potentially more will be minted in accordance to the issuance schedule of the coin in question. So in an ICO, the initial sum of tokens might be, e.g. 1,000,000 coins, with the issuer keeping, say, 300,000 coins and selling the rest. If buyers invest USD 1,000,000,000 as in this case, then very theoretically, the issuer now holds USD 300,000,000 worth of the tokens they issued. In practice, to use those funds for operational expenses (or drugs and prostitutes, as the suspicion tends to be), they need to sell the tokens on the open market, and are likely to get much less than the "nominal" value if they sell large amounts. Again, I have no knowledge of what the particulars of Telegram's ICO are, just pointing out that they probably haven't raised USD 1B in operational funds.