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Bitcoin’s bull run till now has been largely affected owing to other global tech giants stepping into the bitcoin and cryptocurrencies space. BTC price having plateaued somewhere around $10,000, the crypto world received another huge blow when Facebook, earlier this year, announced plans to launch its own cryptocurrency, Libra.
While Libra is embroiled in multiple regulatory controversies, Telegram, another messaging app with well over 300 million users across the world, announced that it’s all set to launch its own cryptocurrency.
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According to a report, “the first batches” of Telegram’s cryptocurrency, Gram, are going to be made public in the following couple of months. In the report, Telegram also announced the launch of Gram digital wallets which will be available to Telegram users for storing a wide range of other cryptocurrencies, including Gram.
Top investors in the Gram project consists of some of the largest Silicon Valley VC firms. As the legal documents on the report state, Telegram must adhere to a stringent deadline of 31st October. If the company fails to launch Gram by that date, it might lose around $1.7B that it has raised in anticipation of the coin.
The last time Telegram made it to the headlines was because of canceling its ICO and declaring that Gram coins won’t be open for public sale for the time being. The cancellation came as a got a bullet in the arm to public investors who hoped to get associated with one of the largest cryptocurrency investment opportunities in history. Some, though, attributed the shutdown to increasingly tight regulations proposed by the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and other lawmakers.
This time, Telegram claims that the coins, once released, will be governed by a decentralized network of computers, just like its encrypted messaging app. The company will have zero control over the coins and how they’ve moved around. This leaves the applicability of Gram coins for both good as well as bad purposes.
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However, it still remains to be seen how regulators will treat the new cryptocurrency from Telegram. The facts they would definitely be considering are Telegram app’s decentralized nature and its previous encounters with governments.
