Daily: Telegram wants 1.6 BILLION ???!!!

Today on Box Mining Daily, we take a look at the market and the market continues to bleed. But is there a silver lining? Because we see Telegram raising a second round of ICO money. Well, it's more of a private sale actually. So they're selling out coins to private institutions and they want to do a second round raising more than $1 billion. We also have Robinhood. So they're starting their zero-fee trading today with Bitcoin going live. Of course, their trading is a little bit different in the sense that they're going for a few states at a time. We also have Bitcoin developer, our friend Jimmy Song. He's about to pay for Bitcoin developers to get trained in a new program called Platypus. This is an effort to increase more developers in the cryptocurrency ecosystem. And lastly, of course, we got some screenshots of a new Ledger desktop. So it looks pretty cool and we're going to take a closer look at that. My name is Michael and this is Vox Mining Daily and everything covered here is my personal opinion and not financial advice. Starting with the market, we see a slight push up after quite a depressing spiral down towards yesterday. So yesterday we continued to see a drop in the price of cryptocurrencies, but now we see a quite a sharp spike forward. This is just so symbolic of what always happens in cryptocurrencies. It's just the fact that cryptos go up and down and up and down and this is something that really freaks out new investors. And this is another reason why a lot of institutions aren't coming in yet. It's just the price is way too volatile. You might make a contract for a price and three days later it's like half. You know, that's how crazy this market is. I mean, for us, it's just a practice of hodling on or trying to at least try to make sense of everything that's happening. So let's talk about some interesting news. So Telegram, it's not just holding one round of ICO. They're doing a second round, a second secretive round of ICO. So initially they reported to raise around $850 million through big Silicon Valley giants such as Sequoia Capital or Benchmark. So these are not going through public sales. So there's no public sale for Telegram. Just to update you guys, you guys cannot buy it. It has to be from these big, big, you know, old school capital giants. Well, they raised $850 million. Now they want to do a second round. So they might go up to $1.6 billion in fundraising. That is absolutely crazy. So if you don't feel bullish right now, Silicon Valley definitely feels bullish on cryptocurrencies because they're willing to offer $1.6 billion to Telegram. So right now it does seem like this is going to be the biggest ICO yet. And obviously a lot of people in crypto don't get access to it. So it's very unfortunate for us to just kind of watch on the sideline. But it just goes to show that these institutions are just waiting for an opportunity to pounce and invest on cryptocurrencies when they get a chance. One of the reasons why they might get a chance to do so is because everything is offered in private rounds. It's much easier for them not to get classified as a security. So this might be a future direction for ICOs even. Because right now they realize how cool ICOs are and the Valley wants to get involved. And of course, the moment you open that to the public, the SEC might have some form of say. So it might be the case in the future. Depressing as it is that the good ICOs might just be going through private investments instead of public ones on here. Next up, we have Robinhood. So Robinhood is going to start trade cryptocurrencies. Robinhood is a trading platform for normal stocks. And now they're offering cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. People initially signed up for it. And it took a while for this to get released. So they're slowly releasing it in different sort of states right now. So they're testing out their system. The unfortunate part about Robinhood, I guess, is that they use current exchanges instead of providing their own one. So they're kind of like getting that money, sending it to current existing exchanges and doing that trade. But what it does mean is still mean it still offers a lot more people access to cryptocurrencies. So far, we don't notice a huge change in price just yet. But as this slowly expands, so it won't be like a spike up in price or volume. But it might be a gradual thing as more and more people have access to cryptocurrencies. Next up, we have our friend Jimmy Song. So Jimmy Song has been on this channel a few times. He's a Bitcoin developer and he wants to fund more Bitcoin development. I think there's something that's very core and important. Developers are extremely important in this space, especially when it comes to protocol level stuff. That Bitcoin core needs developers. So Jimmy is trying to fund a course to teach developers how to develop for Bitcoin core and, of course, try to fund that a little bit. So providing some money, monetary incentives so this can get moved forward. Lastly, I saw this on Twitter today. Seems pretty interesting. So Ledger is announcing a desktop and mobile wallet application. This is something that we've been asking for for such a long time. We have the Ledger Nano S, but unfortunately, you can only use it with ProMap and so hard to use. And for interacting with the Ethereum blockchain, we use MyEther Wallet, which still isn't a really beautiful seamless interface. So what they seem to be providing is they want to introduce a new desktop app that you can use with your Ledger Nano. So it's supporting Ledger Nano S and, of course, Ledger Blue. The only downside of this is that it's going to come in Q2 of this year. So it might be a few months before they release the desktop version and the mobile version is coming in Q3. So it might take maybe even half a year before this gets fully implemented and we can see this in action. Thank you so much for watching this episode. What do you guys think of the Telegram ICO? Are you guys still excited for it or are you guys super disappointed that it's only accessible to private rounds? I mean, $1.6 billion is so much money and it just seems so bullish for all these institutions to go forward. Do you think it's bullish or do you think that they're right? And crypto has a very bright future ahead. Thank you guys so much for watching this episode. Remember to click that little subscribe button to subscribe to this channel. And I also got a Telegram announcement group just for announcements of new things happening on this channel. And you can check that out on the link down below. Thank you guys so much for watching. See you next time.