Telegram 通过迄今最大规模的 ICO 预售融资 8.5 亿美元，构建 TON

做的是什么生意

Telegram is an encrypted messaging app that claimed 170M monthly users by late 2017, and it was raising to build TON, a blockchain platform for payments, distributed storage, decentralized VPNs and dApps.

启动资金：$850M ICO pre-sale per SEC Form D (81 investors, first sale 2018-01-29); Telegram had previously taken no outside investment, self-funded by Pavel and Nikolai Durov.

起因

Pavel and Nikolai Durov built VKontakte, Russia's answer to Facebook, then left Russia in 2014 after a falling-out with investors they linked to the government; they later set up Telegram and kept it self-funded. By October 2017 the app reported 170M monthly users and 70B daily messages, and it claimed over 60% of ICO projects ran their communities on it — the audience that made a token sale the natural first monetization.

经过

In January 2018 TechCrunch obtained TON's white paper and investor prospectuses: Telegram planned a $1.2B raise in two stages — a $600M invite-only pre-sale to VCs and insiders (minimum $20M, discounts above 50%) plus a $600M public sale in March — which would double the $257M Filecoin record. Demand outran the plan: Bloomberg reported the pre-sale growing from its $600M target, and by the time the SEC Form D was signed on 2018-02-13, $850M had been sold to 81 investors under 'purchase agreements for cryptocurrency,' with proceeds earmarked for TON and Telegram. TON's roadmap promised an MVP in Q2 2018, a wallet in Q4 2018, and storage, proxy and dApp services in 2019 — all before the underlying technology existed. Pre-sale allocations were already reportedly changing hands at double the price, and scammers were running fake ICO sites to ride the interest.

可借鉴之处

现有分发渠道可以为未构建的产品提供资金——仅凭消息应用信任就卖出了 Grams——但大户折扣提前加载了现金和炒作，因此交付必须快过故事。