Telegram is already a huge messaging app. Telegram has 180 million users.
Telegram is a messaging app with a focus on speed and security, it’s super-fast, simple and free. You can use Telegram on all your devices at the same time — your messages sync seamlessly across any number of your phones, tablets or computers.
With Telegram, you can send messages, photos, videos and files of any type (doc, zip, mp3, etc), as well as create groups for up to 50,000 people or channels for broadcasting to unlimited audiences. You can write to your phone contacts and find people by their usernames. As a result, Telegram is like SMS and email combined — and can take care of all your personal or business messaging needs. In addition to this, we support end-to-end encrypted voice calls.
Telegram is planning to raise as much as $500 million in a pre-ICO sale at a potential total token value in the range of $3 billion to $5 billion.
The token sale itself could enable Telegram to launch with a market cap of $5 billion.
Pre-sale investors may be required to place a minimum buy-in of $20 million.
Telegram plans to use the money to enable it to match WeChat and WhatsApp.
Unlike WhatsApp, Telegram is a cloud-based messenger with seamless sync. As a result, you can access your messages from several devices at once, including tablets and computers, and share an unlimited number of photos, videos and files (doc, zip, mp3, etc.) of up to 1,5 GB each. And if you don’t want to store all that data on your device, you can always keep it in the cloud.
Telegram will have a centralized and decentralized infrastructure, since a totally decentralized network doesn’t scale as fast as one which has some elements of centralization, hence why Telegram needs to own its own blockchain.
Moving to a decentralized blockchain platform could kill two birds with one stone for Telegram. As well as creating a full-blown cryptocurrency economy inside the app, it would also insulate it against the attacks and accusations of nation-states such as Iran, where it now accounts for 40% of Iran’s internet traffic but was temporarily blocked amongst nationwide protests against the government.
Telegram has a 132-page whitepaper. The whitepaper describes TON as a “third generation blockchain” that will consist of a master chain and 2-to-the-power-of-92 accompanying blockchains.
Telegram has outlined a four-stage plan:
1. TON Services – a platform for third-party services of any kind that enables smartphone like friendly interfaces for decentralized apps and smart contracts.
2. TON DNS is a service for assigning human-readable names to accounts, smart contracts services and network nodes. With TON DNS, accessing decentralized services could be like “viewing a website on the World Wide Web.”
3. TON Payments is a platform for micropayments and a micropayment channel network. It aims to be used for “instant off-chain value transfers between users bots and other services”. Safeguards built into the system are designed to ensure that these transfers “are as secure as on-chain transactions”.
4. TON Blockchain will consist of a master chain and 2-to-the-power-of-92 accompanying blockchains. Its most notable aspect is that it will have an “Infinite Sharding Paradigm” to achieve scalability. Thus, TON blockchains aim to be able to “automatically split and merge to accommodate changes in load”. This would mean new blocks are generated quickly and “the absence of long queues helps keep transaction costs low, even if some of the services using the platform become massively popular”.
They will have <>BInstant Hypercube Routing so the blockchain can maintain top speed even as it grows.
They will have a proof of stake approach will reach consensus through a variant of the ‘Byzantine Fault Tolerant’ protocol for increased speed and efficiency.
2-D Distributed Ledgers will allow new valid blocks on top of any blocks that were proven to be incorrect to avoid any unnecessary forks. The blockchain will be self-healing.
TON’s third generation blockchain will be based on a dynamic ‘proof of stake’ secured by multiple parties with a high degree of fault tolerance. It will also handle storage of ID, payments and smart contracts. Telegram will rely on a new, less energy-hogging way of mining cryptocurrency than the original Bitcoin method.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
Known for identifying cutting edge technologies, he is currently a Co-Founder of a startup and fundraiser for high potential early-stage companies. He is the Head of Research for Allocations for deep technology investments and an Angel Investor at Space Angels.
A frequent speaker at corporations, he has been a TEDx speaker, a Singularity University speaker and guest at numerous interviews for radio and podcasts. He is open to public speaking and advising engagements.