Durov's Honest Channel

👉Announcing a $200,000 giveaway! 🪙

To celebrate our new feature, I’m hosting a giveaway of 10,000 Telegram Premium subscriptions 🤑

In a week, 10,000 random subscribers of my channel will receive a Telegram Premium subscription for 6 months 🤱

I have already prepaid for this giveaway on Fragment with $200,000-worth of
Toncoin I bought on a cryptoexchange. Enjoy! ☕️

Some people are wishing me a happy "birthday" today.
But today, 10.10.2023, is not really the day when I was born.

I was actually born many years ago – today is merely an anniversary of my birthday.

Personally, I prefer to celebrate it as the 12th anniversary of my 27th birthday anniversary.

Don’t let yourselves get misled! 🍸

The day has come. Telegram channels can now post Stories!

Stories on Telegram are more visible than in most apps, because they are displayed right on the main screen. Obviously, we couldn’t let channels flood users with Stories without reasonable limits: this would create too much noise in your Chats.

This is why we designed the Boost system. With Boosts, users can give their favorite channels the ability to post stories. More boosts mean more stories per day for a channel. Every 24 hours users can reassign their boost.

In the future, boosts will also unlock other features for channels, such as custom reactions, emoji statuses or custom backgrounds. We’ll also introduce more ways for channels to get Boosts.

To prevent abuse, only Premium users can boost channels. It shouldn’t be hard to collect Boosts for channels with real subscribers, while those with fake followers may struggle (larger channels need more Boosts to unlock stories).

Let the Boost Hunt begin! 🏹

🔍This month we changed how searching public channels and groups works on Telegram.

Previously, public channels with more subscribers would appear higher in the search results. That system worked fine for a while, but was increasingly getting abused by spammers. That's why we now only count genuine subscribers of channels for ranking.

For example, channels with more Premium subscribers will generally rank higher. However, if a specific Premium subscriber joins too many channels, they won't give those channels as big of a search ranking boost. Of course, the new search also prioritizes results from your country.

The feedback on this change is overwhelmingly positive. Channels with an inflated subscribers count have become less visible, while useful groups and mini-apps are now attracting more users. 🚀

Years ago, we built TON – a scalable and fast blockchain technology. TON was designed to serve hundreds of millions of social media users. Since 2020, the TON technology has been maintained and improved by the open source community.

Last year, we enabled our users to buy and sell Telegram usernames and IDs on Fragment – a TON-based auction platform. It was a phenomenal success. Telegram sold $120M worth of digital assets in auctions, while early buyers of some Telegram-related digital assets – such as Telegram anonymous numbers – have seen a 27x (!) increase in value after only 9 months.

This success showed the potential of Web 3.0 on Telegram. For the first time in history, users were allowed to own their social media identities directly. Now we want to integrate blockchain technologies deeper into Telegram. To do that, we worked with the folks from the TON community to add their TON Wallet to Telegram as a mini-app.

Starting this November, TON Wallet will be included in the settings and attachment menus for all our users outside the US and some other countries (if you added @wallet and have the latest version of Telegram, you can already see the wallet option in the menus). This step will allow developers to enable hundreds of new valuable features – similar to those pioneered on Fragment. TON Wallet, a third-party mini-app inside Telegram, will introduce a whole new dimension of Web 3.0 to hundreds of millions of Telegram users.

Every day, over 2.5 million new users sign up for Telegram, and earlier this year we’ve surpassed 800 million monthly active users. We are happy and grateful, even though this massive growth also means higher expenses on storage and traffic to serve our users.

Luckily, Telegram is super efficient when it comes to expenses and we had a great start with monetization last year. While not yet profitable (which would be impossible to reach on just the second year of monetization), Telegram is closer to profitability in absolute numbers than its competitors such as Twitter and Snap.

To fund Telegram’s continued growth until we reach the break-even point, this week we issued around $270 million worth of Telegram bonds as a tap of our existing bonds. Once again we've been lucky to have the participation of well-known funds with stellar reputations.

I personally bought about a quarter of the new Telegram bonds, investing tens of millions into Telegram’s growth. This comes in addition to the hundreds of millions I spent over the last 10 years to keep Telegram operational.

Some people suggested I should have instead bought a house or a jet. But I prefer to stay focused on my work, without “owning” anything (well, apart from Telegram, some Bitcoin and some Toncoin).

Hundreds of millions of people signed up for Telegram because they wanted an independent messaging platform that would put its users first. It is my responsibility – and my life’s work – to keep delivering this platform.