[NayamAmarshe]

Ultimately, they are looking to raise money for Telegram.

Durov has been funding it with his own savings for more than 8 years, which is great but a project as big as Telegram eventually needs more funding, especially when it's literally Messenger + Google Drive + Social Media + Privacy Respecting. It's hard to make money when the world runs on selling data and obviously, Telegram Premium has not been very successful.

I do not mind the auction of the usernames to be very honest as I understand why they're being auctioned in the first place.

Arbitrary or not, I'm a Telegram super-user, out of the 20 public groups and channels that I have, only one had its username take away and only because it was inactive. Could be a glitch, could be intentional but I do know that it's partly because of me that the channel looked like a dead one.