In 2023, U.S. VCs faced a liquidity crisis, investing $60 billion more than they returned, with only $26 billion in returns – the lowest since 2011.
Despite record-high funding in recent years, the exit market has been quiet. However, IPOs like Klarna and ServiceTitan may bring relief in 2024, potentially reducing the deficit.
In 2023, U.S. VCs faced a liquidity crisis, investing $60 billion more than they returned, with only $26 billion in returns – the lowest since 2011.
Despite record-high funding in recent years, the exit market has been quiet. However, IPOs like Klarna and ServiceTitan may bring relief in 2024, potentially reducing the deficit.
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. As a result, the pandemic saw many newcomers to Telegram, including prominent anti-vaccine activists who used the app's hands-off approach to share false information on shots, a study from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue shows. The perpetrators use various names to carry out the investment scams. They may also impersonate or clone licensed capital market intermediaries by using the names, logos, credentials, websites and other details of the legitimate entities to promote the illegal schemes. WhatsApp, a rival messaging platform, introduced some measures to counter disinformation when Covid-19 was first sweeping the world.
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