{"id":11452,"date":"2018-12-29T22:34:10","date_gmt":"2018-12-29T22:34:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/?p=11452"},"modified":"2019-04-18T18:12:09","modified_gmt":"2019-04-18T18:12:09","slug":"the-telegram-icos-ton-blockchain-has-questionable-security-and-will-probably-centralise","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/2018\/12\/29\/the-telegram-icos-ton-blockchain-has-questionable-security-and-will-probably-centralise\/","title":{"rendered":"The Telegram ICO’s TON blockchain has questionable security, and will probably centralise"},"content":{"rendered":"

Messaging system Telegram is the favoured chat app for ICOs\u00a0\u2014 every ICO seems to have a Telegram chat room. As founder Pavel Durov told Bloomberg<\/a> in early December 2017, “the entire blockchain and cryptocurrency community just switched to Telegram.”<\/p>\n

Telegram doesn’t have a business model \u2014 it’s funded out of Durov’s pocket, using the $300 million he got for his previous huge success, VKontakte, the Russian answer to Facebook.<\/p>\n

So, Telegram needed money from somewhere. So in early 2018, it did its own sort-of-ICO.<\/p>\n

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The not-an-ICO nets $1.7 billion<\/h3>\n

Telegram started touting an ICO to private investors some time in late 2017. Former employee<\/a> Anton Rozenberg posted to Facebook<\/a> (archive<\/a>) on 21 December 2017, publicly confirming the ICO’s existence \u2014 and linking the teaser video.<\/a><\/p>\n

The video posits a fabulously scaleable blockchain, solving most present blockchain scaling problems \u2014 and every Telegram user<\/em> will get a TON wallet, to store the network’s token, the Gram, “making it the world’s most adopted cryptocurrency.”<\/p>\n

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