Telegram eyes on the blockchain space, raises $850 million

Telegram has successfully raised $850 million from 81 investors according to a filing. It has filed documents with the US Securities and Exchange Commission stating that the money was raised for the development of the TON Blockchain, the development and maintenance of Telegram Messenger and other purposes. The security is described as “purchase agreements for cryptocurrency” and the filing is signed by Pavel Durov, Telegram CEO.

The scalable and flexible Blockchain architecture of TON (Telegram Open Network) consists of a master chain and up to 292 accompanying Blockchains, and is expected to handle millions of transactions per second. Initially, the company expected to raise $600 million to work on its TON project through a public sale that starts in March according to some documents, but it is yet to be seen if the figure will have to be adjusted. It might rise to $1.15 billion or beyond.

Telegram hopes to build a distributed file storage similar to services like Dropcoin and Filecoin, a proxy service for creating decentralized VPN services and TOR-like secure browsing environments based on the blockchain, services for decentralized apps, smart contracts and decentralized web browsing experiences, and payments for micropayments and peer-to-peer transactions.

Telegram is widely used in the crypto community and acts as a go-to platform for different ICOs to create the required communications channel. It also keeps the participants updated about the ICO proceedings. Telegram has a huge user base of around 180 million active users with over 70 billion messages exchanged daily, and this is a key advantage to the platform.