As previously mentioned, Telegram’s team is renowned to be high class in terms of both knowledge and experience (whether in programming or operations).
The remaining 52% retained by the TON reserve could also be potentially sold in the future, which could result in further decline in the price.
Telegram’s ICO is aiming to raise more than USD2 billion dollars initially (representing 44% of the total coins), which if succeeded will put them among the highest tokens/coins in the cryptocurrency market based on market capitlization, this is another potential red flag for ICO investors, as although the ICO has various positives, the high market-cap being targeted could result in this coin being the next Electroneum.
A big red flag here if implemented, if a freemium model is applied instead of the above method, TON’s demand could rapidly decline after it’s launch, much like what is currently happening with Wetrust, a token with an excellent team which meets deadlines but with a continuously declining price.
One of the most important aspects of the success of a token/coin lies within its utility. Telegram notes that being a TON holder has various utilities, the most important being the commission paid to validators for processing transactions and the payment method for purchasing of all digital and physical assets being sold by individual merchants within Telegram.
Telegram aims to provide various services through its ICO, including: Buying and exchanging cryptocurrencies through Telegram’s bots (albeit trading fees in that regard was not mentioned), a TON (Telegram’s coin which stands for Telegram Open Network) based ad exchange within each channel, a TON based market that sells goods and services and a searchable registry of the most popular decentralized applications currently being used by it’s users (much like App store and Google play for centralized applications).
Telegram's main strength lies within their team, their experience on having a working product (unlike most of the current ICOs in the market), a large user-base (which currently totals 200 million monthly users as mentioned) and a good brand image in the crypto market (approximately 78% of the current crypto projects use Telegram as per data from tokenmarket.net).