Telegram's $1.2 Billion ICO Could Be the Most Ambitious Token Sale Yet

To describe Telegram's planned initial coin offering as ambitious would be an understatement.

Rather, the proposed Telegram Open Network would seek nothing short of decentralizing online communication, with a suite of services, from file sharing to anonymous browsing, purchasable with the new crypto tokens, known as grams.

Telegram, which has not responded to CoinDesk's requests for comment, would, no doubt, be the most mainstream company to issue a crypto token to date, although the social messaging app Kik raised $98 million in an ICO in September.

Rumors of the ICO plan started last week, and on Sunday a Russian-language slide deck marked "Ton Draft" was posted on a Russian-language Telegram channel run by Fedor Skuratov, CEO of Combot, an analytics platform for the messaging app.

While the document CoinDesk received, and other investors have confirmed receiving, does not seem to be the most detailed account of the TON system, the primer does provide a basic outline of what Telegram hopes to achieve with its crypto token.

No cryptocurrency has gained truly mainstream success, yet Telegram believes, according to the paper, that a decentralized counterpart to everyday money is needed.

In an effort to do that, the primer explains that 5 billion grams will be generated, with 4 percent reserved for the Telegram team and 44 percent to be sold during the ICO. The remaining 52 percent will be "Retained by the TON Reserve to protect the nascent cryptocurrency from speculative trading and to maintain flexibility at the early stages of the evolution of the system," the primer states.

The ICO is likely all or a part of the "Three big announcements" Telegram co-founder Pavel Durov told his followers about on his public Telegram channel on New Year's Eve.

The Telegram founders' control of the project will shift to a non-profit foundation by 2021.

While the TON's main priority is consumer payments, the primer goes into a number of services Telegram would like to build out that seem to encroach on territories, such as file sharing and privacy, already staked out by well-known and well-funded ICO issuers.