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. But the Ukraine Crisis Media Center's Tsekhanovska points out that communications are often down in zones most affected by the war, making this sort of cross-referencing a luxury many cannot afford. Perpetrators of such fraud use various marketing techniques to attract subscribers on their social media channels. Markets continued to grapple with the economic and corporate earnings implications relating to the Russia-Ukraine conflict. “We have a ton of uncertainty right now,” said Stephanie Link, chief investment strategist and portfolio manager at Hightower Advisors. “We’re dealing with a war, we’re dealing with inflation. We don’t know what it means to earnings.” It is unclear who runs the account, although Russia's official Ministry of Foreign Affairs Twitter account promoted the Telegram channel on Saturday and claimed it was operated by "a group of experts & journalists."
from vn
