But these are foreign corporations? I think I’m confused about how Russians, with offshore corporations, and foreign bank accounts, can suddenly be banhammered by the SEC...
Telegram was implemented in Berlin and now is domiciled in UK; most of their operations, money and people are fully within reach of the western judicial system. While Durov comes from Russia, he is in exile and Telegram is structured to keep their money and people out of the reach of the Russian judicial system for various reasons.
Also, a big part of their target audience of Gram early holders is in USA, so they also obviously care about the legality of these transactions. For them it's not sufficient to have some technical workaround that enables them to sell the tokens they have, they need a solution that allows them to do so legally.
Why are you spreading this lie? It’s very well known by now that Telegram was primarily developed in St. Petersburg, in a building shared with VKontakte.
I should also add the obligatory note that Telegram has shipped obvious backdoors in the past allowing them to selectively decrypt secret chats https://habr.com/en/post/206900/
You are right that they could conceptually have been operating entirely outside the US, which would shield them from any SEC actions... but of cause they aren't operating entirely outside of the US, and as such are not in any meaningful way shielded from SEC actions.
Ok so the SEC order really has teeth because they can use it to pressure Apple and google to remove telegram from their app stores? That’s a significantly less impressive penalty than what Internet lawyers have been telling me.
