A telechelic polymer or oligomer is a prepolymer capable of entering into further polymerization or other reactions through its reactive end-groups.
All polymers resulting from living polymerization are end-functional but may not necessarily be telechelic.
[4] The end-groups of these polymers are ionic or ionizable like carboxylate or quaternary ammonium groups.
In the case of olefins, that is difficult to be functionalized, recent advances in insertion polymerization and post-polymerization can be used to produce telechelic polyolefins.
Particularly, ABA triblock copolymers has received much industrial interest for development of thermoplastic elastomers.