Pavel Durov

▶️ The auction is LIVE! 🥊 t.me/auction/ufcstrike

🥊 Great to see my gym buddy Petr Yan win the UFC title — with Gifts shining in the background 🥊 🎁 The UFC Strike Gifts auction on Telegram starts in 4 hours. Don’t miss it! t.me/auction/ufcstrike 🥊

🐣 It happened. Our decentralized confidential compute network, Cocoon, is live. The first AI requests from users are now being processed by Cocoon with 100% confidentiality. GPU owners are already earning TON. The website https://cocoon.org is up, with documentation and the source code. 🤔 Centralized compute providers such as Amazon and Microsoft act as expensive intermediaries that drive up prices and reduce privacy. Cocoon solves both the economic and confidentiality issues associated with legacy AI compute providers. 🚀 Now we scale. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be onboarding more GPU supply and bringing in more developer demand to Cocoon. Telegram users can expect new AI-related features built on 100% confidentiality. Cocoon will bring control and privacy back where they belong — with users. 🤖

🏆 Khabib’s gift auction on Telegram is live. 29,000 papakhas dropping across 290 fast 5-minute rounds — 100 unique items in each round. 🎁 t.me/auction/KhabibsPapakha

💪 Khabib‘s legendary papakhas — collectibles symbolizing Tradition, Freedom, and Respect — are going on auction on Telegram tomorrow at noon EST (9pm Dubai time). 🌟 As the 29–0 undefeated champion himself puts it: “Some gifts carry more than value — they carry meaning ☝️”

👉 t.me/auction/TelegramPin

A demo of how actions for rare gifts work 🎈

😋 We’re starting to test new Telegram features such as live-streaming in Stories and auctions for gifts. 🍸 Before we auction gifts from superstars and megacelebrities, we’re testing the auction mechanics with the exclusive 🎁 Telegram Plane gift. 🏆 It will be auctioned in 50 rounds, each distributing 20 Telegram Planes to the top 20 bidders. The first round will last 1 hour, while the remaining 49 rounds will last only 5 minutes each. 🔜 The auction starts in half an hour. Make sure you have the latest version of Telegram installed, otherwise you won’t be able to take part. Good luck! 🍀

💬 Telegram is the best platform for AI bots — and the Perplexity bot is a great example. Try it at t.me/askplex and ask it anything 🧠

🕷 A great game about me escaping a French prison — and fighting all the shady characters inside. Give it a try! The Telegram Mini App platform gives developers more freedom and power than any other. The kinds of games it can support are insane. 🎃 Happy Halloween!

🇪🇺 Telegram sent this message to all its users in France regarding Chat Control. People must know the names of those who try to steal their freedoms: Today, the European Union nearly banned your right to privacy. It was set to vote on a law that would force apps to scan every private message, turning everyone’s phone into a spying tool. France led the push for this authoritarian law. Both former and current Interior Ministers, Bruno Retailleau and Laurent Nuñez, supported it. Last March, they declared that police should see French citizens’ private messages (more info here). The Republicans and Macron’s Renaissance group voted for it. Such measures are supposed to “fight crime”, but their real target is regular people. It wouldn’t stop criminals — they could just use VPNs or special websites to hide. Officials’ and police messages wouldn’t be scanned either, since the law conveniently exempts them from surveillance. Only YOU — ordinary citizens — would face the danger of your private messages and photos being compromised. Today, we defended privacy: Germany’s sudden stand saved our rights. But freedoms are still threatened. While French leaders push for total access to private messages, the basic rights of French people — and all Europeans — remain in danger.

The new Telegram update is here — with 12 features added in one month: 💬 E2E Comments & Reactions in Calls ✍️ Notes for Contacts 🎂 Suggested Birthdays 🤖 Threads & Streaming for AI Bots 💡 Bugs & Suggestions Mini App 🎨 New Profile Styles 🎁 Improved Gift UI 🔗 On-chain NFTs on Profiles 🗑 Gift Signature Removal 💧 Liquid Glass Input Field & 🗂️ Tabs All demos and details 👇 telegram.org/blog/comments-in-video-chats-threads-for-bots

I’m turning 41, but I don’t feel like celebrating. Our generation is running out of time to save the free Internet built for us by our fathers. What was once the promise of the free exchange of information is being turned into the ultimate tool of control. Once-free countries are introducing dystopian measures such as digital IDs (UK), online age checks (Australia), and mass scanning of private messages (EU). Germany is persecuting anyone who dares to criticize officials on the Internet. The UK is imprisoning thousands for their tweets. France is criminally investigating tech leaders who defend freedom and privacy. A dark, dystopian world is approaching fast — while we’re asleep. Our generation risks going down in history as the last one that had freedoms — and allowed them to be taken away. We’ve been fed a lie. We’ve been made to believe that the greatest fight of our generation is to destroy everything our forefathers left us: tradition, privacy, sovereignty, the free market, and free speech. By betraying the legacy of our ancestors, we’ve set ourselves on a path toward self-destruction — moral, intellectual, economic, and ultimately biological. So no, I’m not going to celebrate today. I’m running out of time. We are running out of time.

🇲🇩 About a year ago, while I was stuck in Paris, the French intelligence services reached out to me through an intermediary, asking me to help the Moldovan government censor certain Telegram channels ahead of the presidential elections in Moldova. After reviewing the channels flagged by French (and Moldovan) authorities, we identified a few that clearly violated our rules and removed them. The intermediary then informed me that, in exchange for this cooperation, French intelligence would “say good things” about me to the judge who had ordered my arrest in August last year. This was unacceptable on several levels. If the agency did in fact approach the judge — it constituted an attempt to interfere in the judicial process. If it did not, and merely claimed to have done so, then it was exploiting my legal situation in France to influence political developments in Eastern Europe — a pattern we have also observed in Romania 🇷🇴 Shortly thereafter, the Telegram team received a second list of so-called “problematic” Moldovan channels. Unlike the first, nearly all of these channels were legitimate and fully compliant with our rules. Their only commonality was that they voiced political positions disliked by the French and Moldovan governments. We refused to act on this request. Telegram is committed to freedom of speech and will not remove content for political reasons. I will continue to expose every attempt to pressure Telegram into censoring our platform. Stay tuned. 🤝

Growth in the last 30 days 😺

@charliekirk’s death is an assault on free speech. He fought for open debate, and enemies of truth hated him for it. Free expression is under attack worldwide. Once free speech is lost, every other freedom soon follows. We must continue Charlie’s mission to defend it ✉️

🏎 NFTs are back — reimagined. 18 Telegram gifts bought for just $57 a few months ago were traded for a $350,000 car. 🚗

➕ One year ago, the French police detained me for 4 days because some people I’d never heard of used Telegram to coordinate crimes. Arresting a CEO of a major platform over the actions of its users was not only unprecedented — it was legally and logically absurd. A year later, the ‘criminal investigation’ against me is still struggling to find anything that I or Telegram did wrong. Our moderation practices align with industry standards, and Telegram has always responded to every legally binding request from France. Ironically, I was arrested due to the French police’s own mistake: before August 2024, they ignored French and EU laws and hadn’t sent any of their queries to Telegram via the required legal process. They could have learned the correct procedure simply by googling it or asking. One year after this strange arrest, I still have to return to France every 14 days, with no appeal date in sight. Sadly, the only outcome of my arrest so far has been massive damage to France’s image as a free country. 🛠 ✊ We’ll keep fighting — and we will win 😎

🕶🕶🕶🕶 Telegram’s birthday/summer gifts sold out in under 3 minutes, grossing over $11M. To make this round fairer, we limited purchases of Durov’s Sunglasses 🕶 (~$600, max 3 per user) and Resistance Dog 🕶 (~$100, max 5 per user) to Premium users only. Still, both sold out in 15 seconds. 🥹 Should we release 2-3 more gifts on September 1st with even tighter buying restrictions? 🤔

🍬 To celebrate Telegram’s birthday and the summer holiday season, we’re dropping some limited-edition gifts within the next hour: Durov’s Sunglasses, Resistance Dog, Sandcastle, Surfboard and Pink Flamingo 🎁