{"id":12713,"date":"2019-04-18T18:55:34","date_gmt":"2019-04-18T18:55:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/?p=12713"},"modified":"2019-04-18T23:34:53","modified_gmt":"2019-04-18T23:34:53","slug":"telegram-ton-ico-network-in-beta-the-gram-sales-agreement-new-partner-wirecard","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/2019\/04\/18\/telegram-ton-ico-network-in-beta-the-gram-sales-agreement-new-partner-wirecard\/","title":{"rendered":"Telegram TON ICO: network in beta, the Gram sales agreement, new partner Wirecard"},"content":{"rendered":"

Telegram’s blockchainy thing, the Telegram Open Network,<\/a> was supposed to launch in March<\/a> (translation<\/a>) \u2014 but apparently only started its private beta a week ago<\/a> (translation<\/a>), according to two of the development teams given access to the beta.<\/p>\n

The ICO sales agreement has leaked. And Telegram has partnered with German fintech startup Wirecard \u2014 most famous in the UK for trying to get Dan McCrum and Stefania Palma from the Financial Times prosecuted for writing about them.<\/p>\n

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The GRAM token sales agreement leaks<\/h3>\n

Telegram got $1.7 billion selling Gram tokens,<\/a> for use on the Telegram Open Network, to private investors in early 2018 \u2014 or, at least, selling an agreement to provide tokens when the network existed.<\/p>\n

Reports came out that the sales agreement said the network had to be running by October 2019 \u2014 or they’d have to give the money back.<\/p>\n

A document that appears to be the Purchase Agreement for Grams leaked<\/a> (PDF<\/a>, archive<\/a>), and was obtained on 21 February by CoinTelegraph.<\/p>\n

If the “Network Launch” does not occur \u2014 and Telegram does not issue the Gram tokens by 31 October 2019 \u2014\u00a0 they will have to pay back the purchasers the $1.7 billion of actual US dollars they’ve already received.<\/p>\n

But the agreement doesn’t clearly define what would count as a failure \u2014 just that the network is “a new blockchain platform,” and that “‘Network Launch’ means the public release of a version of the TON Network after completion of the test launch and security audits, as determined by the Issuer in its sole discretion.”<\/p>\n

Nothing else is specified \u2014 it just has to be a thing that Gram tokens can exist on, that could plausibly be called a “blockchain platform.” Literally a database of accounts with addresses and balances, and an append-only Merkle tree ledger in there somewhere, would do the job.<\/p>\n

Don’t worry about those many lengthy and detailed white papers Telegram put out \u2014 the sales agreement makes clear that:<\/p>\n

… none of the documentation prepared by the Issuer or the Parent in connection with the Issuance or the development of the TON Network will constitute a Prospectus for the purposes of the Prospectus Directive and no Prospectus will be prepared, approved by any competent authority or published for the purposes of the Prospectus Directive<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

To fulfill the terms of the sales agreement, Telegram doesn’t really need any more than a payment network \u2014 a sort of Paypal-but-on-Telegram \u2014 much as Facebook’s planned “cryptocurrency”<\/a> doesn’t require more than Paypal-but-on-Facebook.<\/p>\n

Wirecard and the Blockchain<\/h3>\n

Telegram want to make the Gram tokens worth something. So they’ve formed a partnership with German financial services startup Wirecard, who sound quite pleased<\/a> to be doing something blockchainy.<\/p>\n

The companies plan “a joint digital financial services, payments and banking platform” that involves the Telegram Open Network in some manner \u2014 or at least TON Labs, the unit developing the Telegram Open Network.<\/p>\n

There’s no details as yet \u2014 “The new partners will announce the release of products into the market in stages and communicate more details around the availability of the services in due course.”<\/p>\n

Wirecard has had blockchain in their thoughts for a while \u2014 Axel Puwein, head of business development, mentioned in an interview<\/a> (translation<\/a>) with Economy (Austria) in November 2018 that Wirecard was looking into machine-to-machine payments on the Internet of Things, via “cryptocurrencies and blockchain technologies.<\/span>”<\/p>\n

Wirecard and the Financial Times<\/h3>\n

Those who follow financial news will know Wirecard better as the company that the Financial Times wrote up on 30 January 2019 as “Executive at payments giant suspected of using forged contracts”<\/a> (archive<\/a>) after an internal presentation that FT saw described “potentially fraudulent money flows” in their Singapore office. Singapore police raided the local office<\/a> on 8 February.<\/p>\n

BaFin, the German financial regulator, didn’t want to penalise Wirecard as the offences had happened outside Germany \u2014 but a senior German executive had approved the transactions in question.<\/a><\/p>\n

The company’s share price promptly fell 35% on the FT story. Wirecard claimed<\/a> “there had been increased short activities on the capital market side” \u2014 and BaFin banned shorting Wirecard<\/a> until 18 April.<\/p>\n

BaFin is now going after the FT journalists,<\/a> Dan McCrum and Stefania Palma, who broke the news of the scandal. WirtschaftsWoche explains<\/a> what Ehssan Khazaeli of BaFin was thinking:<\/p>\n

Dan McCrum … used incorrect words. Thus Wirecard\u2019s office had not been searched, the police had only collected documents. ‘That makes a wrong impression,’ says Khazaeli.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

BaFin filed its complaint<\/a> with the Munich criminal prosecution office a few days ago. The FT is standing by its story and journalists<\/a> \u2014 “it is a smokescreen obscuring the serious allegations that were revealed by the FT” \u2014 and has a long-form writeup<\/a> of the issue.<\/p>\n

No crypto site writing up the Telegram-Wirecard press release has mentioned the company’s aggressive hostility to journalism\u2014 but it strikes me as pretty relevant to their foray into crypto.<\/p>\n

\"Become<\/a>

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What do Telegram have to provide by October 2019? And why partner with Wirecard, who are currently trying to get Financial Times journalists prosecuted for writing about them?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1237,484,1238,1098,9,189,1096,1097,1236],"class_list":["post-12713","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorised","tag-bafin","tag-financial-times","tag-germany","tag-gram","tag-ico","tag-saft","tag-telegram","tag-ton","tag-wirecard"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12713","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12713"}],"version-history":[{"count":35,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12713\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12779,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12713\/revisions\/12779"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12713"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12713"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidgerard.co.uk\/blockchain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12713"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}