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Photo-destroying app Snapchat could be worth $4B by the end of this week

29 percent of Americans think Snapchat will go bust -- or at least lose most of its users -- in 2014.

Image Credit: Snapchat

Snapchat doesn’t make money. It is “kind of” private. It is incredibly addictive. It might be worth $4 billion by the end of this week.

Wait, what?

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Whispers that China’s Tencent may stuff Snapchat with $200 million have being floating around since earlier this week, but when, we didn’t know. It seems it may happen as soon as the end of this week, according to AllThingsD‘s sources. Signia Ventures partner Sunny Dhillon alluded to this at VentureBeat’s GamesBeat conference in Redwood City today, pointing back to rumors that the mobile app might even be combined with WeChat, another messaging app.

The company creates a “self-destructing messaging” app, which means you can send and receive photos and videos that expire after 30 seconds. Once that time is up, that piece of content is no longer accessible — completely deleted from Snapchat’s servers.

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Of course, it’s not the most secure form of private messages. It’s possible to take a screenshot of the message, which Snapchat deals with by simply “alerting” the person that their private message has been compromised. Furthermore, those Snaps that you haven’t opened yet sit on Snapchat’s servers and can be pulled off and given to entities such as law enforcement.

The company most recently took on a $60 million round of funding in June that valued it closer to $800 million.

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