Yes, they've sold $1.7b worth of Gram tokens.
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."
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.