Telegram, one of the fastest growing messaging apps in the world, will for the first time make its Gram token available to retail investors through Liquid exchange. The exchange said that the limited listing will be available from July 10 and that a full public sale is planned for October.
Gram will finally be available to the public
Gram, the native cryptocurrency of messaging giant Telegram, will finally be available to retail investors. While the token has previously been sold through Telegram’s two-part ICO last year, bringing in more than $1.7 billion, this is the first time the general public will be able to purchase Gram.
According to TechCrunch, Gram will go on sale through a listing on cryptocurrency exchange Liquid on July 10. The arrangement is a limited offering, the report said, which will precede a full public sale scheduled for October.
Liquid, however, hasn’t struck a deal directly with Telegram. The exchange will instead list an unspecified number of tokens that are currently held by Gram Asia, a South Korea-based organization that holds a significant amount of the tokens.
Telegram itself has been quiet, failing to issue any official comments on the matter. Mike Kayamori, the CEO of Liquid, told TechCrunch that staying silent on important issues like this is not unusual for Telegram, and assured the public that the token listing was approved by the company.
He also added that the planned Gram listing is “very much part of the plan for TON,” the “Telegram Open Network” blockchain project that the company has been developing.
Telegram testing out the waters before the big sale
Telegram seems to have been working on this for quite some time, with Kayamori saying that a public sale “was always planned” for the window between the testnet launch and the full mainnet launch.
The company, wary of the legal troubles it might face if it launched an ICO, wanted to work with a regulated exchange to test the waters before a full listing in October.
“Telegram already has an ecosystem, developers and early token buyers and TON ventures, there are already communities being built up. Based on discussions within these communities, Gram Asia has put its best step forward to do this public sale,” Kayamori explained.
However, this approach comes with a few major setbacks, the biggest one being that the Gram tokens will not be immediately tradable. Participants in the July sale will be buying tokens from Gram Asia through Liquid, which will then be held in USDC until their release in October.
Apart from that, buyers will be required to pass “rigorous” KYC checks and the tokens will not be sold in over 50 countries.
Despite these setbacks, Kayamori expects significant demand, adding that there is potential to add more tokens if the allocation sells out.
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