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. During the operations, Sebi officials seized various records and documents, including 34 mobile phones, six laptops, four desktops, four tablets, two hard drive disks and one pen drive from the custody of these persons. "The result is on this photo: fiery 'greetings' to the invaders," the Security Service of Ukraine wrote alongside a photo showing several military vehicles among plumes of black smoke. Friday’s performance was part of a larger shift. For the week, the Dow, S&P 500 and Nasdaq fell 2%, 2.9%, and 3.5%, respectively. In the United States, Telegram's lower public profile has helped it mostly avoid high level scrutiny from Congress, but it has not gone unnoticed.
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