Mike Novogratz said that despite Telegram approached him for the TON’s private token sale participation, he refused them multiple time due to his early skepticism about the project.
Wall Street veteran and founder of the Galaxy Digital crypto merchants bank, Mike Novogratz, recently accepted that he missed out on the token sale of Telegram‘s TON cryptocurrency.
During a recent interview with The Block, Novogratz spoke how he missed the opportunity of investing in the Telegram Open Network (TON). Messaging giant Telegram has been work for over a year on its ambitious blockchain project which can see the light of the day anytime soon.
In his interview, Novogratz said that Telegram tried to reach him out almost 15-20 times. However, Novogratz’s team at Galaxy Digital has some skepticism about the project and so he refused to invest, ever single time. Novogratz said:
“They had called 15-20 times to try to get me. And I said no no, my guys hate it, and then I changed my mind. But I changed my mind about three weeks too late and he’s [Telegram’s founder Pavel Durov] like, dude, I can’t help you.”
Novogratz Skeptical of New Protocols
Novogratz further spoke about the newly launched cryptocurrency and blockchain protocols and expressed skepticism on them. According to Novogratz, the new protocols in the market don’t stand the test of time. Moreover, he gave the example of the Cosmos Protocol.
Novogratz was an early investor in Cosmos. However, his team completely pulled-out investments after the holdings shot 50x. Mike Novogratz is known to hold assets for a long time if he sees good potential in them. But it seems that Novogratz holds skeptical views about the newly launched protocols.
Explaining the reason behind it, he said that new protocol releases “have a really hard time lasting because they don’t have that same 20 cheerleaders that bitcoin does”. He also said that users and developers to these protocols don’t allude much to the ecosystem in order to make it robust.
“You’ve got to get developers in the box,” Novogratz states. “Putting people in the box is hard.”
Earlier this month, Telegram launched its test network portal – the TON testnet Explorer. As per TON Lans CTO Mitja Goroshevsky, “Source code for a full node that can access testnet, create and validate blocks has been released”. TON Labs is also said to be building numerous tools for developers in order to help them build on the new network.