Telegram tries to appease the SEC – no Gram tokens in Messenger

[nikivi]

I honestly feel dirty sending media or any kind of files with Telegram. There is no clear business plan setup.

WhatsApp mines metadata/contacts and uses it for ad profiling. Telegram runs on saving. But that can’t scale to the future.

I do hope that whatever this coin is, it success because Telegram is decades ahead in terms of UX/speed than any other messenger.

[giancarlostoro]

Except does it even have reasonable end to end encryption?

[mcrae]

> because Telegram is decades ahead in terms of UX/speed than any other messenger

I'm curious in what ways you feel Telegram so far ('decades') ahead of others? Honestly in my experience Telegram / WhatsApp / Messenger / Line / Kakao / WeChat (outside China) are all at feature parity

[lalaland1125]

The main thing I find amazing about the whole Telegram Gram debacle is the magnitude of money they were able to raise. $1.7 billion is just a ridiculous amount of money. Think about how much good that money could have produced if it were invested into useful companies and startups.

[pavlov]

I recall reading that most of the money came from Russian sources close to oligarchs. So at least it’s not out of the pocket of retail investors unlike some other blockchain scams. OneCoin seems particularly egregious in this regard: https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-50435014

[seibelj]

Still not sure why Telegram cares about the SEC? Russian owners and offshore company, what leverage do US regulators have?

[lawtalkinghuman]

Presumably because if they're not strictly kosher under US law, USD exchanges like Coinbase that try to stay in the good books of the US authorities won't want to touch Telegram's tokens for risk of legal action.

It'd be pretty bad PR for Telegram as a company if the only way to buy their tokens was off shady unregulated exchanges.

[davidgerard]

They want to be able to spend money in the first-world financial system. They touch the US. A US monetary judgement is widely enforceable. The idea that Telegram can just go "US lol" is not the case.

[redwood]

What does this mean for holders of the illiquid grams?

[davidgerard]

The SEC's case says "refund the investors." The money may have been spent, however. (That's what the last para, about bank records, is about.)