6 ms·

Yes, they've sold $1.7b worth of Gram tokens.

nwah1 8y ago
Are you sure? Usually these ICO numbers are calculated based on the market cap of all the coins, much of which would not be owned by Telegram, and would've been sold off at a lower price than the current price. Also, this market cap is not based on any kind of value investing principles or anything, just the current spot price of these coins. If too many people tried to cash out at the same time, the spot prices would drop like a rock.
- starshadowx2 8y ago
  I'm not sure if you're talking about the market after the presale or not. All the tokens have so far been created and sold directly by Telegram. They have sold $1.7b worth of tokens to investors. It doesn't matter what those investors now sell the tokens at, and even if price drops to 0 Telegram still got the money from the investors.
- coolspot 8y ago
  There are two SEC forms $850M each: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16997991 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16997991
  - ordinaryradical 8y ago
    But was this 850 M from crypto people diversifying their portfolio (for example BTC for TON?) The filing says USD but does that mean the transactions were carried out in USD or worth 850 M at the time according to the coin value of the exchanged currencies? I think that’s what we’re trying to zero in on. One is serious IPO money, the other is a clever financing solution that may be entirely inflated by speculation not to mention subject to extraordinary volatilty.
tCfD 8y ago
To who? ICO schemes have been using the cover of anonymity and obfuscation of ownership flows due to sock puppet and Dutch bidding since they began on bitcointalk years ago. There is no way to tell in this or any other ICO which uses wallet addresses whose ownership id hidden behind layers of anonymity (in other words, all of them), how much of that 'sale' was merely the same old ethereum token market makers, hedge funds or even regular oldpump-n-dump groups moving quantities of token from one pocket to the other. It's absolutely in their interest, and within the capacity of their not inconsiderable leverage, to generate breathless speculator excitement around all of the wildly extrapolated dollar figures that come from the combined effect of the bubble and the order (or two or three) of magnitude which some of the biggesr players in this market can bring to bear on these extremely close-held assets.
- starshadowx2 8y ago
  SEC filings say 81 investors for the first 850m and 94 for the second. Does it matter who it's sold to though? In the context of the parent question it doesn't, it was only a question of whether it was sold at all.
  - tCfD 8y ago
    The SEC forms do not say anything to discharge, invalidate or answer the question of whether these funds were moved from one group of anonymous parties largely back to that same group in order to generate a bunch of transaction churn on the eth blockchain with whivh they can attach bubble-inflated dollar amounts to. How is the SEC going to know that, for example, the 80 individuals identified in one filing didn't move 850 Million worth of etherium to the 90 in the other filing, and vice versa? There is no direct association between individuals and addresses on blockchains. This is the problem with ICO evaluations constantly being tossed around and irresponsibly promoted by careless or indifferent finance and tech journalists. tossed around. It's gas, vapor, the same money being search related over and over again to convince mom and pop speculator that there's a stability of large numbers in these things. Can you make money on it? Yes, I have, and so have lots of people. That doesn't mean it's something that should be endorsed or suggested is legitimate to an unsuspecting public.
dragandj 8y ago
What have they received in return? Real United States Dollars or ETH, BTC, or, even worse, some shitcoins?
- jeremyt 8y ago
  Takes about 30 minutes to sell BTC or ETH for dollars.
  - SI_Rob 8y ago
    I doubt there's even 1.7bn worth of Ethereum liquidity available altogether, let alone enough capable of supporting that figure in a 30 minute selloff. What will likely happen is at most 5-10% gets liquidated over the course of a few months to a year and the rest makes the rounds in crypto-crypto OTC deals, or otherwise simply never moves to cash at all.
    - wmf 8y ago
      So you're proposing, what, that Telegram raised money not to use it but for PR? Or just to sit on it Scrooge McDuck style? Granted, at a $100M/year burn rate it would take them a long time to spend it anyway.
khazhoux 8y ago
This doesn't pass the sniff test. That's 1/10th the amount raised by Facebook IPO. Facebook, the heir apparent to Google-sized Silicon Valley domination, which everybody and their mother knew about, and which every(ish) investor wanted a piece of. And here we have Telegram, a niche product using an experimental financing scheme and a technology that many are skeptical of. Yet somehow they convinced people to the tune of 1/10th FB? Only way this adds up is if people bought the tokens using Bitcoin (with its very fuzzy and hard-to-liquidate value), and the SEC filing reports that towards the "amount raised."
- SI_Rob 8y ago
  I'm inclined to agree that this doesn't seem to add up, but I don't think that matters much any more. There seems to be a transition taking place in which exaggerated, thinly-supported 'market cap'-based value metrics, the fundamentals of which are largely opaque to outside analysis (almost all being derived from coinmarketcap, a single centralized aggregator site), are the new normal. Peeling this onion apart would require what seems an unlikely pairing of extremely high cryptocurrency domain competence and extraordinary resistance to corruption.

Are you sure? Usually these ICO numbers are calculated based on the market cap of all the coins, much of which would not be owned by Telegram, and would've been sold off at a lower price than the current price. Also, this market cap is not based on any kind of value investing principles or anything, just the current spot price of these coins. If too many people tried to cash out at the same time, the spot prices would drop like a rock.

starshadowx2 8y ago
I'm not sure if you're talking about the market after the presale or not. All the tokens have so far been created and sold directly by Telegram. They have sold $1.7b worth of tokens to investors. It doesn't matter what those investors now sell the tokens at, and even if price drops to 0 Telegram still got the money from the investors.
coolspot 8y ago
There are two SEC forms $850M each: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16997991 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16997991
- ordinaryradical 8y ago
  But was this 850 M from crypto people diversifying their portfolio (for example BTC for TON?) The filing says USD but does that mean the transactions were carried out in USD or worth 850 M at the time according to the coin value of the exchanged currencies? I think that’s what we’re trying to zero in on. One is serious IPO money, the other is a clever financing solution that may be entirely inflated by speculation not to mention subject to extraordinary volatilty.

tCfD 8y ago

To who? ICO schemes have been using the cover of anonymity and obfuscation of ownership flows due to sock puppet and Dutch bidding since they began on bitcointalk years ago. There is no way to tell in this or any other ICO which uses wallet addresses whose ownership id hidden behind layers of anonymity (in other words, all of them), how much of that 'sale' was merely the same old ethereum token market makers, hedge funds or even regular oldpump-n-dump groups moving quantities of token from one pocket to the other. It's absolutely in their interest, and within the capacity of their not inconsiderable leverage, to generate breathless speculator excitement around all of the wildly extrapolated dollar figures that come from the combined effect of the bubble and the order (or two or three) of magnitude which some of the biggesr players in this market can bring to bear on these extremely close-held assets.

starshadowx2 8y ago
SEC filings say 81 investors for the first 850m and 94 for the second. Does it matter who it's sold to though? In the context of the parent question it doesn't, it was only a question of whether it was sold at all.
- tCfD 8y ago
  The SEC forms do not say anything to discharge, invalidate or answer the question of whether these funds were moved from one group of anonymous parties largely back to that same group in order to generate a bunch of transaction churn on the eth blockchain with whivh they can attach bubble-inflated dollar amounts to. How is the SEC going to know that, for example, the 80 individuals identified in one filing didn't move 850 Million worth of etherium to the 90 in the other filing, and vice versa? There is no direct association between individuals and addresses on blockchains. This is the problem with ICO evaluations constantly being tossed around and irresponsibly promoted by careless or indifferent finance and tech journalists. tossed around. It's gas, vapor, the same money being search related over and over again to convince mom and pop speculator that there's a stability of large numbers in these things. Can you make money on it? Yes, I have, and so have lots of people. That doesn't mean it's something that should be endorsed or suggested is legitimate to an unsuspecting public.

dragandj 8y ago

What have they received in return? Real United States Dollars or ETH, BTC, or, even worse, some shitcoins?

jeremyt 8y ago
Takes about 30 minutes to sell BTC or ETH for dollars.
- SI_Rob 8y ago
  I doubt there's even 1.7bn worth of Ethereum liquidity available altogether, let alone enough capable of supporting that figure in a 30 minute selloff. What will likely happen is at most 5-10% gets liquidated over the course of a few months to a year and the rest makes the rounds in crypto-crypto OTC deals, or otherwise simply never moves to cash at all.
  - wmf 8y ago
    So you're proposing, what, that Telegram raised money not to use it but for PR? Or just to sit on it Scrooge McDuck style? Granted, at a $100M/year burn rate it would take them a long time to spend it anyway.

khazhoux 8y ago

This doesn't pass the sniff test. That's 1/10th the amount raised by Facebook IPO. Facebook, the heir apparent to Google-sized Silicon Valley domination, which everybody and their mother knew about, and which every(ish) investor wanted a piece of. And here we have Telegram, a niche product using an experimental financing scheme and a technology that many are skeptical of. Yet somehow they convinced people to the tune of 1/10th FB? Only way this adds up is if people bought the tokens using Bitcoin (with its very fuzzy and hard-to-liquidate value), and the SEC filing reports that towards the "amount raised."

SI_Rob 8y ago
I'm inclined to agree that this doesn't seem to add up, but I don't think that matters much any more. There seems to be a transition taking place in which exaggerated, thinly-supported 'market cap'-based value metrics, the fundamentals of which are largely opaque to outside analysis (almost all being derived from coinmarketcap, a single centralized aggregator site), are the new normal. Peeling this onion apart would require what seems an unlikely pairing of extremely high cryptocurrency domain competence and extraordinary resistance to corruption.