I have no inside knowledge of a potential stock listing of the popular anti-Whatsapp messaging app, Telegram. But I know this much, judging by most people I talk to, especially crypto investors, if Telegram ever went public, people would gobble it up. I know I would. I’m waiting for it. So is Sergei Sergienko, who claims he owns $800,000 of Telegram’s pre-initial coin offering (ICO) tokens. “If Telegram does a SPAC IPO, there would be demand for this issue. It would probably outstrip the interest we saw during the ICO. Why? Because as of right now Telegram looks like a liberal application that can accept anyone - right after WhatsApp and others have turn on the censorship,” he says.
Telegram auto-delete message, expiring invites, and more
elegram is updating its messaging app with options for auto-deleting messages, expiring invite links, and new unlimited groups, the company shared in a blog post. Much like Signal, Telegram received a burst of new users in the confusion over WhatsApp’s privacy policy and now the company is adopting features that were already part of its competitors’ apps, features which offer more security and privacy. Auto-deleting messages were already possible in Telegram’s encrypted Secret Chats, but this new update for iOS and Android adds the option to make messages disappear in any kind of chat. Auto-delete can be enabled inside of chats, and set to delete either 24 hours or seven days after messages are sent. Auto-delete won’t remove every message though; if a message was sent before the feature was turned on, it’ll stick around. Telegram’s competitors have had similar features: WhatsApp introduced a feature in 2020 and Signal has had disappearing messages since at least 2016.
