Telegram CEO Pavel Durov gave a deposition relating to the corporate’s alleged violation of United States securities legislation by conducting $1.
Telegram CEO Pavel Durov gave a deposition relating to the corporate’s alleged violation of United States securities legislation by conducting $1.7 billion Gram token sale in 2018.
According to a related court order, the deposition was held on Jan. 7 and Jan. eight earlier than a courtroom reporter designated by the courtroom reporting service engaged by plaintiff represented by the US Securities and Change Fee (SEC).
SEC makes use of the 18-hour deposition to proceed grill Telegram on the way it spent $1.7 billion
Based on the official transcript doc, the deposition was held in Dubai and concerned Telegram lawyer Alexander Drylewski and SEC official Jorge Tenreiro. The primary a part of the deposition on Jan. 7 began at 11:21 AM to finish at 10:00 PM, whereas the second on Jan. eight was a bit shorter, starting at 10:23 AM and ending at 06:09 PM, native time.
The deposition was videotaped, whereas the accessible official transcript report is fragmented, with important components of the deposition having been omitted supposedly for the sake of confidentiality.
Throughout the deposition, which mixed took round 18 hours with breaks, the SEC questioned Telegram extensively on the corporate’s bills and funding used to arrange the agency. Responding to 1 such query, Durov answered that the corporate plans to proceed to spend funds in a method much like budgets from earlier years:
“My expectation is that we are going to proceed to spend funds in a way much like which came about final 12 months or this 12 months — or, yeah, final 12 months and the start of this 12 months. So we do not anticipate large adjustments up till the launch of TON once we count on that sure bills may go down on account of the truth that we’ll now not be spending sources on growing and testing TON.”
Telegram will distribute some Grams amongst its devs
Tenreiro additional requested the defendants on what proportion of Grams out of the 5 billion tokens in circulation shall be held by Telegram’s workers upon the launch. In response, Durov reconfirmed that Telegram won’t maintain any Grams after the launch of the Telegram Open Community (TON). Telegram CEO added that the agency plans to distribute 4% of Grams amongst its builders, noting that they’re nonetheless “evaluating” actual figures:
“I can reconfirm that Telegram won’t maintain any Grams submit launch. We talked about within the providing supplies that we plan to distribute Four p.c of Grams, which needs to be round 200 million Grams, I imagine, among the many improvement group, and we’re nonetheless evaluating, below the circumstances, whether or not we’d proceed with that preliminary plan of distributing all or a few of these 200 million Grams among the many builders that labored on TON.”
The SEC additionally didn’t miss the prospect to ask Telegram about incentives for its builders, relating to which Durov talked about Telegram’s good contracts contest announced in September 2019. The manager added that the prize funds is “continues to be there” and the agency continues accepting and rewarding people throughout the program.
Durov funded Telegram between 2012 and 2018 by cash from the sale of VKontakte
Based on a deposition transcript acquired by Russian publication The Bell, Durov financed Telegram from his private expenditure coming from the sale of VKontakte (VK) in 2014. Durov, who founded the Fb-like Russian social media web site again in 2006, claimed that he used his funds from VK from 2013 up till 2018.
Moreover, Durov mentioned that Telegram’s employees depend has not modified a lot since 2017, accounting for 25 workers who “write programming code.” The agency has additionally concerned “a whole lot of unbiased contractors” although, Durov added.
As lately reported by Cointelegraph, Telegram should present its redacted financial institution data to the courtroom till Feb. 26. Whereas the authorized battle between the SEC and Telegram has been hitting up, some software program makers have continued to work on block explorers designed for the TON blockchain.