How much did the AR guys that are showing 3D renders raise again? The ones that everybody is calling scam?
I can also present to you an alternative viewpoint (non-scammy) on Telegram:
Telegram has the leading mindshare in crypto space communications which could mean that they will be able to drive day-to-day adoption. Imagine paying back your friends through Telegram. And most of your Telegram friends are anyways crypto savvy and would love to use this. I can fully reason TON being very relevant if they get the tech right.
About getting the tech right - they've built Telegram, right? It's an app that's being used daily. And it works great. And the founder is a very successful serial investor. I wouldn't bet against Telegram that they actually pull this off. With so much money they could easily buy a crypto team to give them the missing skills.
Let's crunch some numbers:
- They've sold for 1.7B USD of tokens. And let's say that they sold 50% of their tokens. This gives them 3.4B market cap.
- Let us look at the coinmarketcap.com - you can see that EOS, which has not launched the mainnet and has an ICO ongoing for the past year (raised ~2B so far). They don't have any real-world usage (remember - they do not have a public blockchain running) and they are currently valued at 14B.
- It's not unreasonable to expect that you will profit from buying TON tokens.
In the end - these are big boys that are investing. They understand due diligence. It's going to be hard for them to scream "its a scam".
And just to be clear, my definition of scam is: "I am lying about what I will do with the purpose of taking the money from you." Here its more of "I have a wish list of things I want to build, but I'm not experienced enough to know that this might be harder than expected." But this is what startups do daily. The only difference is that Telegram (and other crypto projects) is able to get cash at a much larger scale.
PS: I still don't like TON ICO.