SEC interrogated Pavel Durov around 18 hours

Telegram CEO Pavel Durov testified regarding his company’s alleged violation of US securities laws during its $ 1.7 billion token sale in 2018, Cointelegraph writes.

In accordance with the court order, the interrogation was conducted on January 7-8 in the presence of the stenographer appointed by the court stenography service. According to the official transcript, Durov testified in Dubai with the participation of Telegram lawyer Alexander Drylevsky and representative of the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Jorge Tenreiro. The first part of the interrogation took place on January 7 and began at 11:21 local time, and ended at 22:00, the second part – on January 8 from 10:23 to 18:09.

The interrogation was recorded on a video camera, while the publicly available transcript was significantly edited, presumably to exclude confidential information from it.

In total, the interrogation lasted about 18 hours. A SEC representative asked all kinds of questions about the costs and financing of the company. Durov replied that Telegram plans to continue to build its budget in the way it did before.

“I expect that we will continue to spend money in the same way as we did this and that year. Yes, last year and the beginning of this year. Therefore, we do not expect big changes until we launch TON, when we can expect to reduce certain costs due to the fact that we no longer have to spend resources on the development and testing of TON. ”

Tenreiro asked the defendants what percentage of the 5 billion Gram tokens in circulation would be in the hands of Telegram employees at the time the network was launched. Durov noted that Telegram will not hold Gram after the launch of its main blockchain and will distribute 4% Gram among developers, however, specific values are for further discussion.

“I can reaffirm that Telegram will not hold Gram after launch. We mentioned in the materials regarding the offer of tokens that we plan to distribute 4% Gram, which should be about 200 million Gram, among the development team. “We continue to evaluate whether we should comply with this initial plan in the current circumstances and distribute all or part of the 200 million Gram to the developers who worked on the Gram.”

SEC also did not miss the opportunity to ask about incentives for developers. In response, Durov mentioned the competition for the authors of smart contracts, launched in September 2019. According to him, the budget for prizes has not yet been allocated, and the company continues to attract and reward developers as part of this program.