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📰 Yesterday, a French newspaper claimed that my detainment in France last summer ‘finally’ forced Telegram to comply with European rules. This is false. Telegram has always been compliant with EU laws. 🇪🇺

👮‍♂️ After last August, it was the French police that finally started to ‘comply with European rules’ — by sending their requests to Telegram in the legal way described by the EU’s Digital Services Act. As a result, French courts have been able to receive IP addresses of criminal suspects from Telegram. 🧑‍⚖️

🌐 The information about this legal way to reach us could be obtained on our apps, website or just by googling ‘telegram eu police’ — long before my detainment in France. Why the French courts and police had been ignoring this process clearly defined by EU law is still a mystery to us, but it’s unfair to say that Telegram somehow ignored European rules. Paradoxically, it was French law enforcement that for some reason had been ignoring them. 🤔

🇫🇷 I love France and respect its police force, so I didn’t want to embarrass anyone by pointing out the above. But I cannot ignore when such obvious misinformation about Telegram is spread. 🙅‍♂️

🥈 Telegram is the 2nd most popular messaging app in the world. We spend millions of dollars every year to ensure our compliance with laws across the globe. In the EU in particular, we always start preparing to comply with laws years before they even come into force. 🗓

This is what the brightest minds of Silicon Valley are saying about The Open Network.

Peter Fenton, Partner at Benchmark:

“Telegram’s user base, which is expected to grow to over 1.5 billion through 2030, creates an unprecedented opportunity in the history of humanity to provide ubiquitous financial flows that have been limited until now to information flows, TON provides the backbone for human-scale democratization of financial activity.”

Micky Malka, Founder, at Ribbit:

“Ribbit partners with exceptional teams tackling and solving the world’s biggest problems. TON and Telegram exemplify this, working together to expand financial access globally by coupling the best technology with a seamless consumer experience.”

Tim Draper, Founder of Draper Associates:

“I’ve been a long-time believer in the potential of blockchain to disrupt traditional industries and systems. TON’s technology is highly impressive, and its integration with Telegram provides it with a distribution that no other blockchain can match.” 

Shaun Maguire, Partner at Sequoia Capital:

“The TON team is the best in the world at the intersection of consumer product thinking and crypto infrastructure. When you combine this with the global distribution of Telegram, we’re very excited to see where they go.”

I know only a few people who can spot technology trends as well as Peter, Micky, and Tim (most of the others also invested in TON). I haven’t met Shaun from Sequoia yet, but from everything I’ve heard, he’s just as visionary as the rest of this stellar group of investors.

🤝 We agreed with the TON Foundation to make TON the exclusive blockchain partner of Telegram. TON will be our blockchain infrastructure for tokenization, payouts, mini app integrations, and more 🏆

🙂 This standardization will be great for Telegram users — giving them a consistent, predictable experience and better protection against scams 🛡

🖥 Mini apps developers can check out the Blockchain Guidelines to see what’s new. I foresee a wave of innovation coming from this strong integration between Telegram and TON 🔗

Millions of people have been signing up and sharing content on Telegram in the last hour while Instagram and Facebook were down. Interestingly, Telegram is more reliable than these services — despite spending several times less on infrastructure per user.

We also have about 1000 times (!) fewer full-time employees than Meta, but manage to launch new features and innovate faster.

Throughout 2023, Telegram was unavailable for a total of only 9 minutes out of the year’s 525,600 minutes. That’s a 99.9983% uptime 🏅