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May 2020 www.intellinews.com I Page 4
has been able to negotiate "a leasing holidays" for its partner taxi companies, Vedomosti reported. According to the report, all taxi companies connected to Yandex.Taxi will be able to cut their leasing payments by 50% to 80% for a period of up to three months. Other support measures include delays in leasing payments and cancellation of late payment fees.
Vezet deal scrapped
In late March, Yandex.Taxi put a brake on the acquisition of another taxi company, Vezet.
As profiled by bne IntelliNews in February 2019 before the deals were announced, Vezet is one of Russia’s biggest regional taxi players and would have strengthened Yandex.Taxi’s business to the east of the Ural Mountains.
In late 2019, Yandex planned to snapped Vezet
Russian internet guru Pavel Durov cancels the TON blockchain project
Internet guru and owner of the Telegram message service Pavel Durov has halted his TON block chain project and may have to return the $1.7bn he raised in the largest ever ICO to fund the project.
“Today is a sad day for us here at Telegram.
We are announcing the discontinuation of our blockchain project. Below is a summary of what it was and why we had to abandon it,” Durov announced on his Telegram channel.
The much-hyped project was to create a state- of-the-art blockchain with the associated
from its rival Mail.ru in a deal that would include 3.6% equity and $71.5mn in cash. With a market share of about 12%, Vezet was expected to significantly strengthening Yandex.Taxi's position.
It wasn't clear whether the cancellation of the deal was linked to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic and ensuing lockdown measures.
Vezet was established in 2017 in a merger of Fasten Russia, Saturn, Red Taxi, RuTaxi, Lider and Vezet operators. The company operates in over 100 cities in Russia, Kazakhstan and the Czech Republic, processing over 1mn orders a day.
In 2017 the group had 12.3% of the Russian taxi market, which was larger than the 10.4% joint share of Yandex.Taxi and Uber prior to their merger of regional operations.
Gram coin that was to become a platform for commercialising blockchain. Despite all the hype surrounding blockchain there has yet to be a single widely used commercial application of the technology, partly due to the difficulties related to the lack of a widely used and accessible platform.
“For the last two and a half years some of our best engineers have been working on a next- generation blockchain platform called TON
and a cryptocurrency we were going to name Gram. TON was designed to share the principles of decentralisation pioneered by Bitcoin and Ethereum, but to be vastly superior to them in