Blockchain and Cryptocurrency: People, Culture and Tech
For eight months, the encrypted messaging app and the regulator have been coming to blows—with the SEC claiming the company’s $1.7 billion sale of gram tokens was an illegal securities sale. Under the deal announced on June 26, Telegram would pay an $18.5 million penalty and return $1.2 billion—about 70% of the funds raised—to investors.
Telegram CEO Pavel Durov announced on May 12 that his messaging platform’s active involvement with TON is over—using a blog post to lambast the U.S. judge who effectively stopped the project from going ahead.
In an April 30 letter to investors, Durov put his stake in the Telegram messaging app on the table, offering to reimburse 110% of their investment with his own money if they let their gram token investment ride for another year. Otherwise, they can cash out now, getting back 72 cents on the dollar.
Eleven cryptocurrency issuers and exchanges including Tron, Block.one, and Binance were hit with class action lawsuits last week for holding or supporting initial coin offerings. Ominously, they were filed by a group of lawyers led by Philippe Selendy, who the Financial Times called “The man who took on Wall Street” after he forced 16 major banks including Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and JPMorgan Chase to pay $25 billion for their part in the subprime mortgage crisis that sparked the Great Recession of 2007.