Telegram’s cryptocurrency— the Gram — will reportedly be unveiled very soon. According to a report at The New York Times, the Russian based encrypted messaging app company plans to deliver “the first batches” of the coin in the next two months.
A cryptocurrency (or crypto currency) is a digital asset designed to work as a medium of exchange that uses strong cryptography to secure financial transactions, control the creation of additional units, and verify the transfer of assets. In other words its an internet-based medium of exchange which uses cryptographical functions to conduct financial transactions .
Gram has been in the works for Telegram for some time and initial reports had indicated that the company had shelved the project, so the news may come as a bit of a surprise unless you’ve been following Telegram and cryptocurrency closely that it will be launched soon. But if you have, you’ve probably reports that Telegram has a hard deadline to make it happen: if it doesn’t deliver by October 31st, it legally forfeits the $1.7 billion it raised to make Gram a reality.
That October 31st deadline is real, according to legal documents reviewed by the Times, so the company’s trying to make those coins real, too, and as quickly as possible.
The service will be available worldwide and Telegram plans to offer Gram to all its 200+ million users around the world, and users will apparently store them in a Gram digital wallet. Cryptocurrencies leverage blockchain technology to gain decentralization, transparency, and immutability.
It’s not quite clear how regulators might deal with a new Telegram cryptocurrency, seeing how Telegram itself is a decentralized messaging operation that’s happily tangled with governments in the past. Lets also not forget Facebook’s Libra is the closest parallel, that is still facing off with different government and regulatory bodies and is being critically scrutinized closely.
