"We're seeing really dramatic moves, and it's all really tied to Ukraine right now, and in a secondary way, in terms of interest rates," Octavio Marenzi, CEO of Opimas, told Yahoo Finance Live on Thursday. "This war in Ukraine is going to give the Fed the ammunition, the cover that it needs, to not raise interest rates too quickly. And I think Jay Powell is a very tepid sort of inflation fighter and he's not going to do as much as he needs to do to get that under control. And this seems like an excuse to kick the can further down the road still and not do too much too soon." 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. On Feb. 27, however, he admitted from his Russian-language account that "Telegram channels are increasingly becoming a source of unverified information related to Ukrainian events." The Russian invasion of Ukraine has been a driving force in markets for the past few weeks. The fake Zelenskiy account reached 20,000 followers on Telegram before it was shut down, a remedial action that experts say is all too rare.
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