Sources: Telegram contacts investors for second pre-ICO sale, amount still being determined but estimated to bring total raised to $1.6B+ before public ICO
> “The first presale was rumored to be oversubscribed, and early investors are reportedly flipping their shares and making 2x returns on the secondary market.” @mikeisaac : ahhh, ICO's “they may not be regulated securities in the eyes of the SEC, but they'll sure fuck you like one” http://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Telegram's token sale has outrun its own plan in five weeks: documents showed a planned $1.2B raise starting with a $600M pre-sale in mid-January, and by last weekend an SEC filing already recorded $850M raised for the TON Blockchain and Telegram Messenger itself. Now sources say Telegram is going back to investors for a second pre-ICO tranche that would push the total past $1.6B before any public sale opens.
The demand signal behind the move is the rumored oversubscription of the first pre-sale, with early investors reportedly flipping allocations for roughly 2x on the secondary market. That dynamic — institutional money crowding in ahead of retail — is exactly what the broader ICO market's unregulated-abuse warnings were about when Smith + Crown counted 65 projects raising $522M last June.
First-order effects
- Accredited investors get a second shot at TON allocations while the secondary market already prices them at about 2x, meaning new pre-sale money is buying into an asset whose paper gains are being set by flippers rather than the network.
- Telegram's war chest grows well beyond the original $1.2B target, funding both the TON Blockchain and continued development of Telegram Messenger per its own SEC filing.
Second-order effects
- A raise this size crowds out the public sale: if pre-sales keep absorbing capital, the open ICO becomes a residual event, and the eventual outcome — Telegram later calling off the public part entirely after raising $1.7B from 175 accredited investors — shows where this path leads.
- Rival token projects face a bar-raising problem: a single messenger app raising more than the entire tracked ICO market did in half of 2017 forces competing teams toward larger private rounds and away from small public offerings.
Third-order effects
- Token fundraising is structurally splitting into two tiers — mega-rounds negotiated privately with accredited investors, and a diminished public tier — which is precisely the concentration the SEC's stated interest in exempting some offerings while policing others will have to adjudicate.
- Secondary-market flipping of pre-sale allocations creates a de facto securities market before any regulator has ruled tokens are securities, building the exact enforcement record that later shaped how the SEC treated large token raises.
The trend: Large token offerings are migrating from open public sales to oversized private placements with accredited investors, with secondary-market flipping setting prices ahead of any regulatory framework.