Two unexpected monster icos

Two unexpected monster icos
“Enjoyed, our ICO was a lavish success!” – Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro. Image by Agencia de Noticias Andes via Flickr.com. License: Creative Commons

The ICO hype is already fleeing? Are you kidding me? Are you serious when you say that. It starts. The Messenger-Service Telegram and the government of Venezuela Capital have recently collected via ICO. With revenue of more than $ 700 million each, the two are now competing for the record.

Telegram: Record before the real ICO

Telegram should not be unknown in the crypto scene. The app developed by two Russian brothers for the exchange of encrypted message became the preferred messenger of users who were concerned about their privacy. Telegram now has 180 million users and is one of the most popular media in the crypto scene.

So it makes sense that the company now also collects money via ICO. Telegram announces that the “Telegram Open Network (Ton)” will be formed in which the Gram tokens are valid. Ton is to become a blockchain project that is described in more detail in the white paper usual for ICOS. It will be able to process millions of transactions per second, but will be user-friendly and secure, support Turing-specific smart contracts and micropayment channels, offer a decentralized data memory, anonymize nodes and integrate a “self-healing vertical blockchain mechanism” and “instant hypercube routing”, whatever that should be. In short: sound will realize everything that someone has ever wanted from a blockchain.

The white paper itself is thin and should actually be a bad basis to justify the high goal of one billion dollars that Telegram has set for the ICO. But since the crypto scene is just enthusiastic about Telegram, and the Russians have already proven differently than many blockchain founders that they are able to develop good, user-friendly software and also scale to more than a hundred million users, enjoy an immense advance of trust.

In this case it is worth a few tons of gold. Already in the pre-sale of the ICO, in which selected investors were able to buy gram tokens in packages from $ 20 million from $ 20 million, 81 multimillionaires were found on the table in total. With that, the Telegram ICO, even before it went publicly, was by far the greatest ICO of all time. So far, Filecoin has held this record with a good $ 250 million.

Because things are going so well, Telegram quickly set up the goal of the ICO. Instead of one, the company now wants to catch up with two billion dollars. Since the American stock exchange supervision SEC has announced that I can see ICOs as equity sales, it is likely that Americans are not allowed to take part in a public telegram ico. Therefore, added to Telegram, the verge has already learned for investors for a second preliminary round, which, according to unconfirmed sources of the magazine, will be as high as the first.

A blogger at Forbes therefore calls the Telegram-ICO bluntly fraud. Jason Bloomberg has no functioning business model with the Messanger app and is now looking for funds to cover the expenses included in the past.

Venezuela: The first ICO for the state treasury

It is unexpected that a socialist country is the first country to use an ICO to fill up the state treasury. But as is well known, need makes inventive. Venezuela, the South American country, which was fraudled by socialist mismanagement and falling oil prices, has recently started selling the “Petro” by ICO.

According to the government, a petro is covered by a barrel of crude oil, which is about 159 liters and currently costs around $ 60 on the world markets. The Venezuela government now sells 100 million petros of 60 dollars each. Later, the Petro tokens are to become a regular means of payment that can be used to control, fees and other public services in Venezuela. As with all ICOs, there is a (Spanish) white paper that describes how the petro should work. According to this, he is processed as an ERC20 token on Ethereum blockchain.

First, however, the country takes on by the sale of the Petro. According to President Nicolás Maduro, investors have already bought Petro worth $ 735 million. However, there is no evidence of this, as is not known whether the Petro is acquired by real dollars or by cryptocurrencies. It would of course be a nice turn if the government of Venezuela, after it was done against Bitcoin, now had more than $ 700 million in cryptocurrencies.

Some senators in the United States are not very delighted by all of this. For them, the sale of Petro is only a method through which Venezuela deals with the sanctions of the international community in order to collect money on the international markets that are otherwise not or only to a limited extent or only to a limited extent. Welcome to 21. century.