Pavel Durov's $1.7B pre-sale in 2018 with Benchmark, Sequoia and Lightspeed was the whale ICO of its era. The SEC sued in 2019 and forced Telegram to return most of the money and scrap the launch in 2020. The open-source community picked up the code, shipped it as The Open Network, and Telegram quietly brought it back through the in-app wallet years later..