By
Steve Muchoki
April 23rd, 2024
Though there is still not so much precise information about Telegram’s ICO and its Gram coin, experts are already making predictions about its fortune.
Telegram’s cryptocurrency called Gram is predicted to reach a $200 billion market cap in five years. Nevertheless, some experts believe that Telegram’s ICO is still overvalued. There is different information on how much the company hopes to raise, some reports say Telegram team has a goal to attract $2.6 billion during its ICO while some others believe that their aim is $4–5 billion.
That was Aaron Brown, a former managing director at quantitative investment firm AQR Capital Management, who supposed that the native token of the Telegram Open Network could achieve a $200 billion market cap in quite a short period of time, which will bring ICO investors good profits. Being an experienced player on the crypto arena, Brown doesn’t gamble on the Telegram deal for himself personally. And one of the reasons is that it’s overvalued.
According to Brown’s forecasts, in 5 years there will be 300 million users of cryptocurrencies and their aggregate market cap will increase to $5 trillion. In such conditions, Telegram has a potential to attract 4 percent of these people to its platform.
Brown said that Telegram has chances to become one-third the size of giant internet companies while crypto will get a share of one-third of the value of internet businesses. Nevertheless, such a situation is just a best-case scenario and there is a wide range of obstacles for making it a reality.
In accordance with Brown’s most positive estimates, Gram can reach a $1 billion valuation at launch or even more. The expert said that Gram’s value will be derived from the users’ transactions balances, it means from the sum that they have in their accounts.
Telegram provides an encrypted-messaging service that has gained popularity with people interested in crypto trading and investing in ICOs. As it has reported in the beginning of the year, the platform has 180 million active users and can boast 500,000 new sign-ups and over 70 billion messages sent per day. And now the team plans to create the ‘third generation’ Telegram Open Network offering support to thousands of decentralized applications, the raised funds will be allocated namely to the development of this initiative.
It’s worth mentioning that in the pre-sale round Telegram has already managed to raise $850 million which significantly exceeds their initial target. There were also talks about a second secret pre-ICO sale aimed to raise exactly the same amount as the first round.
But the opinions of experts on this issue really differ. Some of them do not consider it right to offer an opportunity to buy Gram only for accredited investors with at least a half a million dollars and not to approach the public directly in a crowdsale method. Others do not understand why Telegram need to attract such a huge sum of investments for its project and think that Telegram is just cashing its image.
Nevertheless, the hype around Telegram may contribute to attracting more money into another startups’ ICOs which are predicted to reach combined $18 billion in 2018.