The only explanation model I have for this round is money laundering. Can someone with more insight enlighten me on what would make someone seriously invest in this with more than pocket change?
People believing they can make a 3.5-fold increase is what makes them invest.
In practice it's not much of a problem, because you sell your ICO tokens for Bitcoin and then you sell your Bitcoin for dollars/yen/won/euros at a licensed crypto-to-fiat exchange like Coinbase, Bitthumb, Gemini, etc. You do lose anonymity because all the fiat exchanges have KYC identity-verification procedures, but each step of the transaction is legal (for the ICO buyer), so there's little risk.
If you spent $1000 on BTC 5 years ago, you now have ~$100k of bitcoin. So why not let $30k ride on telegram ICO exploding and getting it up to a million?
Right now, most of bitcoin's liquidity comes from drugs – if you want to purchase anything, you have to go through it, or other, much less safe payment systems. However, the marketplaces move rapidly from darkweb to Telegram; and since buyers already heavily use it to connect to dealers and dealer's bots, it's an easy and natural progression to pay in the same app, too.
Out of personal experience with above points, I have no doubt that Gram will be huge on day one.
Two forms, $850M each:
[1] - https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1729650/000095017218...
[2] - https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1729650/000095017218...