Sergey Solonin, co-founder of Qiwi, a major NASDAQ-listed Russian e-payment operator, confimed that he personally invested Telegram’s ICO private presale. The Russian businessman revealed this investment informally during the Russian Investment Forum, an international business event which is taking place these days in Sochi on the Black Sea. [Update Feb. 26: Among the other Russian businessmen investing in Telegram are billionaire Roman Abramovich ($300 million) and Wimm-Bill-Dann founder David Yabobashvili ($10 million).]
Solonin put $17 million in the instant messenger’s blockchain project, one of his representatives said later in an exchange with Russian business daily Vedomosti.
Commenting on Telegram’s plans to build a “new type of blockchain,” Solonin said he was “interested in a theme that addresses a range of blockchain-related questions which haven’t found an answer so far.”
He also expressed regrets that Telegram as a company has been registered outside Russia: “It could have been a Russian company if there hadn’t been certain [local] conditions which made it impossible, and this is a big pity.”
Telegram, which does not communicate much about the locations of its offices, has at least a part of its team based in Dubai, as reported by Bloomberg. The company itself is registered as an English LLP and under other jursidictions under a complex ownership scheme.
Exceptional opportunity or marketing fluff?
The public phase of Telegram’s ICO is scheduled for start in March. The objective is raise more than $1 billion, an unnamed Telegram investor told Vedomosti. The company might seek to raise a much larger amount, according to diverging reports.
Telegram’s supporters believe that this ICO could be the blockchain investment of the century, given the impressive success of the instant messenger launched less than five years ago by Pavel Durov, the enfant terrible of the Russian digital industry.
Claiming more than 200 million users from across the world — who appreciate, in particular, its superior privacy protection features, — Telegram has asserted itself as an important player on the global digital scene. Now the company wants to launch its own blockchain platform with a native cryptocurrency to support payment transactions within the app.
The ‘Telegram Open Network’ (TON) is intended to be nothing short of a next-gen blockchain, comparable to what Bitcoin and Ethereum brought to the market in their time.
However, Telegram’s ICO has not earned unanimous trust. “Skeptics believe the company is bilking investors out of billions of dollars based on marketing fluff and a heavy dose of FOMO — fear of missing out,” notes CNBC.
“You could see how people would say this one checks all the boxes — amazing team, a market set up for them and a good product,” Travis Scher, vice president of investments at Digital Currency Group in New York, was quoted as saying.
Nevertheless, Scher’s firm isn’t investing because “the numbers are totally out of whack,” the US investor told CNBC.
