Telegram

Quoting @durov's announcement:

🎉 More good news – I am happy to share that Telegram has raised over $1 billion by selling bonds (a form of debt) to some of the largest and most knowledgeable investors from all over the world. This will enable Telegram to continue growing globally while sticking to its values and remaining independent. These resources will also fuel the monetization strategy I outlined in December.

As I said when launching Telegram almost 8 years ago, the end goal for Telegram is to become a financially sustainable project that can serve humanity for decades (or centuries) to come. Today's news is another step towards that goal.

This is a pretty big (and from a certain point of view also concerning) news. Telegram infrastructure is entirely proprietary and operating it requires around ~120 million $/year (according to TON's most recent whitepaper). Telegram's plan to launch TON and use its ICO money ($1.7 bn) to finance its development for the upcoming years was crashed by the SEC. Considering Durov finances are not a bottomless pit, it was quite predictable that emitting bonds was the only way to fund Telegram in the short term, while they figure out a way to monetize the service. It will be interesting to follow the development of this closely to see what's going to happen in the near future, hopefully the list of investors will be published soon