"Added to that, the fact that Telegram isn’t in control of the flow of capital at this early stage doesn’t look good."
I don't understand that, why would they not have access to the capital which they raised? Didn't they sell the tokens?
What a shit article, could at least provide some details.
One source said an early investor who acquired a tranche of tokens at a price of $0.37 is actively seeking to sell for $1.30 — potentially a 3.5-fold increase for a token that hasn’t left the gate yet.
That sort of flipping (or "capital flow") isn't typically possible in startup fundraising because investors are restricted from selling their stock.
For a normal startup it would look bad if your investors wanted to sell their stock immediately because they would be signaling a lack of confidence in the future. For this Telegram ICO, it isn't quite the same, but some people might look at it as a bad sign in a similar way. To me, it is hard to tell what the underlying basis for any valuation of this ICO is.
An ICO is more like an IPO than a seed round, in terms of who buys in. And early investors / insiders quite commonly sell fine stocks shortly after IPO.
None of this is a comment on the quality of Telegram in particular.
Ex buy at 0.30. Price goes to 1.2, sell 25% of holdings to cover cost, but let profit ride.
As the saying goes, "Can't lose money by taking profits".
Explain please. Does this literally mean Telegraph has $1.7b of cash in their bank account now?
Also, this market cap is not based on any kind of value investing principles or anything, just the current spot price of these coins. If too many people tried to cash out at the same time, the spot prices would drop like a rock.
All the tokens have so far been created and sold directly by Telegram. They have sold $1.7b worth of tokens to investors. It doesn't matter what those investors now sell the tokens at, and even if price drops to 0 Telegram still got the money from the investors.
I think that’s what we’re trying to zero in on. One is serious IPO money, the other is a clever financing solution that may be entirely inflated by speculation not to mention subject to extraordinary volatilty.
There is no way to tell in this or any other ICO which uses wallet addresses whose ownership id hidden behind layers of anonymity (in other words, all of them), how much of that 'sale' was merely the same old ethereum token market makers, hedge funds or even regular oldpump-n-dump groups moving quantities of token from one pocket to the other.
It's absolutely in their interest, and within the capacity of their not inconsiderable leverage, to generate breathless speculator excitement around all of the wildly extrapolated dollar figures that come from the combined effect of the bubble and the order (or two or three) of magnitude which some of the biggesr players in this market can bring to bear on these extremely close-held assets.
There is no direct association between individuals and addresses on blockchains. This is the problem with ICO evaluations constantly being tossed around and irresponsibly promoted by careless or indifferent finance and tech journalists. tossed around. It's gas, vapor, the same money being search related over and over again to convince mom and pop speculator that there's a stability of large numbers in these things. Can you make money on it? Yes, I have, and so have lots of people. That doesn't mean it's something that should be endorsed or suggested is legitimate to an unsuspecting public.
That's 1/10th the amount raised by Facebook IPO. Facebook, the heir apparent to Google-sized Silicon Valley domination, which everybody and their mother knew about, and which every(ish) investor wanted a piece of.
And here we have Telegram, a niche product using an experimental financing scheme and a technology that many are skeptical of. Yet somehow they convinced people to the tune of 1/10th FB?
Only way this adds up is if people bought the tokens using Bitcoin (with its very fuzzy and hard-to-liquidate value), and the SEC filing reports that towards the "amount raised."