Telegram raises $210M through bond sales
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
E: downvoted for this?
Pushing cryptoscams and paywalling a subset of emoji-reactions made me move off of telegram. Now I use matrix and as a nice side effect I have whatsapp and telegram bridged in one app.
Of course, it's all open source with the typical lack of polishing. But nobody is gonna pull the rug under me because the company needs $$$ after acquiring users.
I don’t have a problem with their monetary model, because they don’t paywall any essential feature. and not in-your-face about it, and it really is one of the few apps I use on every single device I own.
Have you heard about the mess that was Durov’s channel some months ago? Telegram is now reserving and then selling usernames as NFTs for crypto on a new site: fragment.com (Use a VPN since it blocks access from the US)
Durov first announced it on his channel and the large majority of the telegram community downvoted it to show disapproval of integrating NFTs and crypto into telegram [1]. Telegram/Durov’s response? Disable negative reactions and ignore it. For later posts, talk about how there was such a great response to them (because only negative reactions were disabled), and how they’re moving forward with it.
Then, when they started, what happened to the people with their old names? Telegram took them without warning [2]. And it wasn’t just any common names, multiple chats I was in had their name, their brand taken even though it was multiple semi-common words stringed together to 19+ characters.
[1] and [2] - I can’t find an online source currently on my phone. I can personally vouch for it, but I understand evidence would be appreciated. If anyone can find a source, that would be greatly appreciated.
You mean adding extra sets of emojis and not changing the existing ones? Paying for cosmetics is a pretty good way of monetizing.
> Of course, it's all open source with the typical lack of polishing. But nobody is gonna pull the rug under me because the company needs $$$ after acquiring users.
It literally works better than all the "non opensource polished" apps. Looking at you Discord - a shame of a company to all users.
Who'd have thought that it's so hard to make a chat app?
We will probably see it growing in US, as we get closer to elections, and censorship tightens!
Or did I get that wrong?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telegram_(software)#Developmen...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blocking_of_Telegram_in_Russia
All of this has been public information since years, there isn’t any proof of anything malevolent happening with the service.
IMHO - it would not be possible for him to leave russia alive without getting some tradeoff with Russian intelligence
$30 to 40 million for interest on this issue.
Telegram sold $1bn of bonds in March 2021, when rates were 25 bps, with a 7% coupon [1]. Rates are now 5.25%. Their new bonds should thus yield 12%+.
That implies a total annual interest bill over $100 million, with a refinancing in 2026 on $1bn. Not ideal.
[1] https://bondblox.com/news/messaging-app-telegram-sells-bonds...
The UAE is an absolute monarchy, and the law is a little more openly a tool if the state than in the west. A company with legal challenges exists there because the state wants it to.
The UAE looks unaligned but in a real way it is part of a Chinese Russian axis when it comes to this sort of thing. For example totok was based on Chinese spyware.
For those of us who don't share truly sensitive information, I'm sure it's fine, but Ukrainian war reporters probably shouldn't have it installed.
huh, I thought Telegram was still stationed in Germany. I wonder what made them move.
Germany is not an attractive place for smaller companies, especially for those formed outside of the country and not perfectly familiar with the German language.
It wouldn’t be on my list of reasons to leave a country.
Most of what governments do is harmful to society. The more inefficient and inept they are at it, the better.
Sure, it may be an inconvenience sometimes. But it's nothing compared to the dystopian horror of what a truly efficient government would look like. The "ideal" government that works purely electronically through automatically-applied rules is the worst world I can imagine living in. Every additional day we can manage to hold off that future is a victory.
Hard disagree. Some of what they do is harmful, and needs a vigilant and active population to keep at bay; but the vast vast majority is massively useful, or even critical. Decentralised (as in, not government managed/controlled/planned/regulated, where government could be anything from a single centralised one to a highly local one) infrastructure, education, consumer protections, healthcare, safety/security sound like a nightmare. Reminds me of thet libertarian utopia town with the bears (A Libertarian Walks into a Bear is a fun book).
> (On libertrarians) House cats. They are convinced of their fierce independence while utterly dependent on a system they don't appeciate or understand.
~ John Spaulding
Governments, and their rules are one of the quintessential parts of our modern lives. Noone sane wants to live in the aforementioned utopia.
Telegram's UX quality is far superior to any other messenger app that I've ever used. Its social functions are quite nice too, I think Telegram invented some of them before they were copied by the others.
The thing with Telegram though is that you can never trust a private company if you are a journalist, dissident or a government official. We don't know whether Pavel Durov is as independent as he wants us to believe he is. The big red flag in the Telegram story is why it's still not banned or censored in Russia. We don't know.
But all in all, kudos to those who have built it, they have my respect, Telegram is one of the best pieces of software at least among the messaging apps.
Signal's iOS app is a native Swift/UIKit app and open source however, so I'd encourage you to report any bugs or issues you find: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-iOS
Perhaps Matrix's upcoming Element X -client could reach that level of quality.
Agreed that the classic Element iOS app was very buggy, which is why with Element X we completely rewrote it on top of matrix-rust-sdk, using SwiftUI for best-practice idiomatic native UI on top.
edit Also, how far is Element X? I just tried it out with a matrix.org account, and it still makes the pretty bad UX blunder of confusing private one-on-one chats with rooms. I don't doubt that they're rooms technically, but you really need to hide that fact from the user if you wish to reach Telegram's usability.
Perhaps I should make an issue out of this concern, but I'm a bit afraid that it won't matter: you guys would have done this by now if you thought about it like I do.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blocking_of_Telegram_in_Russia
Thing is that telegram is a completely different app. It has features for discovering and joining communities. Open or closed. Bots, etcetera. Both Signal and Whatsapp do not have that. It is more like a social network.
That said: it is insecure. Especially in war times that does not sound good. If you do not trust signal or whatsapp, there are other secure communication methods. But seriously: telegram is the worst.
If I were a journalist, I wouldn’t use it for the leak of a lifetime. But for the common folks it is absolutely more than fine.
Just look into their PIN + Intel SGX scheme. Or lack of open-source client with reproducible builds.