Recently, Durav wrote on his Telegram channel that users' right to privacy, in light of the war in Ukraine, is "sacred, now more than ever." The original Telegram channel has expanded into a web of accounts for different locations, including specific pages made for individual Russian cities. There's also an English-language website, which states it is owned by the people who run the Telegram channels. At the start of 2018, the company attempted to launch an Initial Coin Offering (ICO) which would enable it to enable payments (and earn the cash that comes from doing so). The initial signals were promising, especially given Telegram’s user base is already fairly crypto-savvy. It raised an initial tranche of cash – worth more than a billion dollars – to help develop the coin before opening sales to the public. Unfortunately, third-party sales of coins bought in those initial fundraising rounds raised the ire of the SEC, which brought the hammer down on the whole operation. In 2020, officials ordered Telegram to pay a fine of $18.5 million and hand back much of the cash that it had raised. Sebi said data, emails and other documents are being retrieved from the seized devices and detailed investigation is in progress. Individual messages can be fully encrypted. But the user has to turn on that function. It's not automatic, as it is on Signal and WhatsApp.
from pl
