The US Securities and Exchange Commission has published the names of some of the investors in Telegram's ICO, CoinDesk has reported citing documents published by the SEC.
One of the investors, a former board member of the Bitcoin Foundation and a partner of Ribbit Capital Micky Malka, was mentioned by project leader Pavel Durov in a deposition presented earlier this month. When asked whether Telegram knew which investors could assume the role of validators in the TON blockchain, Durov said:
"We didn't put together a separate list of the purchasers who we would assume have experience in validating other networks, although it was obvious that certain investors… such as, for example, Micky Malka that we have discussed earlier, might… have experience in these processes of validation or at least were closely affiliated with parties that had experience in such processes."
In addition, Telegram vice president Ilia Prerkopsky mentioned David Yang, ABBYY's founder, as one of the potential investors. According to the SEC, during a conversation in February 2018 Yang asked Prerkopsky whether he could get an allocation from the ICO if he invested in Telegram without intermediaries.
According to the SEC, other possible investors in TON could be the US funds Kleiner Perkins, Fortress, Draper Dragon, Dragoneer, DRW Holdings and Redpoint. There are 8 declarations in which TON investors explain why they decided to buy Gram tokens. Even though the names of the companies and the representatives who testify have been redacted, the file names of these documents contain the names of supposed investors.
Most of the witnesses claim they were interested in being able to support Telegram. Investments range from $5 million to $10 million. Kleiner Perkins was initially offered an allocation of $15 million, however, the company managed to agree to an investment of $30 million.
The SEC has recently said the Telegram team considered the Gram tokens as securities.
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