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Thoughts from the Product Manager / CEO / Founder of Telegram.
🏷 Telegram has launched the most affordable way for businesses to authenticate their customers’ phone numbers — just $0.01 per code, anywhere in the world.
📥 Now businesses can save millions by sending verification codes to their users right through Telegram. This method is much cheaper, faster, and more secure than traditional SMS verification. We call it Telegram Gateway 🔗
💵 Phone number verification is a multibillion-dollar industry. Telegram alone has been spending around $10M per month to authenticate all the users who sign up and log in to our service.
🏅 We’ve made this investment so that others won’t have to. Since we’ve already verified the phone numbers of nearly a billion people, other businesses can avoid high verification costs. And if the phone number they want to verify is not connected to a Telegram account, we won’t charge at all.
🎁 Our prices are unprecedentedly low, so I’m not sure if Telegram Gateway will become a significant revenue source for us. But we hope that this initiative will make the world more efficient, reducing costs and prices for many services worldwide 🤝
#lifestories 🐶
Exactly 18 years ago today, I launched VK—my first large company. Below is the story of how it happened.
I graduated from Saint-Petersburg University in the summer of 2006. I wanted to keep in touch with my former classmates, but I knew it would be hard without a website where everyone could find each other. So, in late August 2006, I set a goal—to build a social network for university students and graduates in four weeks.
I was pretty good at coding. At 12, I built web-based games with vector animations and sound effects. At 13, I was already asked to teach older kids Pascal (a computer language) in summer camps for programmers.
And yet, planning to build a fully-fledged social network in four weeks was overconfident. To make it worse, I decided not to use any ready-made third-party modules. I wanted to create everything from scratch: from profiles and private messages to photo albums and search.
The task seemed too large to grasp. Where do I even start? Back then, my brother Nikolai lived in Germany. Nikolai is a brilliant mathematician and algorithmic programmer, but he’s always considered web development beneath him. At that time, he was focused on his Math thesis at the Max Planck University in Bonn. He refused to help with the code but gave advice: “Write the code for user authorization first,” he said. “You’ll get through.”
This made sense. I started with a login page that generated session IDs. Sessions could then be used to identify users, show them their profile pages, and allow them to edit them. Even the sign-up process could wait: I prepopulated the entries for the first few users manually in the database.
That's when I first understood it clearly: Every complex task is just a combination of many simple ones. If you split a big project into manageable parts and arrange them in the right order, you can get anything done. In theory. In practice, you also encounter all kinds of technical obstacles that test your persistence.
In September 2006, I typically wrote code for 20 hours in a row, had one meal and then slept for 10 hours. After a day of work, I’d boil myself a bucket of pasta and eat it with a generous amount of cheese. No other food was required. I didn’t care whether it was day or night outside. Social connections stopped existing. All that mattered was the code.
I tried to make each section of my project flawless, and that took time. Obsessing over details didn’t help to get everything done in four weeks. But being the only team member allowed me to minimize time spent on internal communication. And since I knew every line of the code base by heart, I could find and fix bugs faster.
On October 10, 2006, I had a beta version of the social network up and running. I called it VKontakte (VK), which means “in contact”. It took me six weeks instead of four to create it. But the result was worth it. Users that I invited from my previous project—a students’ portal I’d been building since 2003—signed up by the thousands and started to invite friends.
I kept adding new features quickly, and competitors struggled to catch up. A few months later, I hired another developer. By that time, VK already had a million members. Within seven years, VK would reach 100 million monthly users. At that point, I was fired by the board of VK, so I left the company to focus fully on Telegram.
That experience of single-handedly building the first version of VK in 2006 was so valuable that it defined my career. As the sole member of the product team, I had to do the work of a front-end developer, back-end developer, UX/UI designer, system administrator, and product manager—all at once. I got to understand the basics of all these jobs. I learned the tiniest details of how a social network works.
I also learned that there are no complex tasks in this world—only many small ones that look scary when combined. Split a big task into smaller parts, organize them in the right sequence—and “you’ll get through”.
🔥 I love the Telegram team. Just yesterday, I suggested 10 improvements to our apps. We had mockups ready the same day, and today, we already have fully functional builds with these features implemented 😳
🆕 These updates include 5 improvements to gifts, 3 to hashtags, the ability to add media to a message after it’s been sent, and the ability to view the time a message was edited 🔜
⚡️ All in just one day. It’s no surprise that the Telegram team has shaped how most messaging apps work today, contributing to nearly every innovation in communication 😒
🫡📊 And here’s another poll.
👵 As I approach my 40th birthday, I realize I have many life stories to tell. Should I start posting them here? 📝
🥳 The holiday season (which includes my birthday 😏) is just around the corner, and today we are launching Gifts!
🎁 Gifts are a great way to congratulate your loved ones on important events. Gift recipients can choose to display them on their profiles or sell them for Stars ⭐
📦 Some gifts are in limited supply. Later this year we’ll introduce the ability to convert these limited-edition gifts into TON-based NFTs. Users will then be able to auction and trade these tokenized gifts outside Telegram, with ownership recorded on the blockchain 🔗
🔜 We also launched other exciting features today, which I’ll cover in a separate post. For now, I’ll let you dive into the gift selection process 🫴🙂
📰 My previous post may have seemed to announce a major shift in how Telegram works. But in reality, little has changed.
🌐 Since 2018, Telegram has been able to disclose IP addresses/phone numbers of criminals to authorities, according to our Privacy Policy in most countries.
⚖️ Whenever we received a properly formed legal request via relevant communication lines, we would verify it and disclose the IP addresses/phone numbers of dangerous criminals. This process had been in place long before last week.
🤖 Our @transparency bot demonstrates exactly that. This bot shows the number of processed requests for user data.
✉️ For example, in Brazil, we disclosed data for 75 legal requests in Q1 (January-March) 2024, 63 in Q2, and 65 in Q3. In India, our largest market, we satisfied 2461 legal requests in Q1, 2151 in Q2, and 2380 in Q3.
📈 In Europe, there was an uptick in the number of valid legal requests we received in Q3. This increase was caused by the fact that more EU authorities started to use the correct communication line for their requests, the one mandated by the EU DSA law. Information about this contact point has been publicly available to anyone who viewed the Telegram website or googled “Telegram EU address for law enforcement” since early 2024.
🤝 To reduce confusion, last week, we streamlined and unified our privacy policy across different countries. But our core principles haven’t changed. We’ve always strived to comply with relevant local laws — as long as they didn’t go against our values of freedom and privacy.
🛡 Telegram was built to protect activists and ordinary people from corrupt governments and corporations — we do not allow criminals to abuse our platform or evade justice.
🎉 Telegram has reached 10 million paid subscribers. 10 million people are now enjoying Telegram Premium!
🆕 Today, we’re introducing new features while phasing out a few outdated ones.
⛔️ We’ve removed the People Nearby feature, which was used by less than 0.1% of Telegram users, but had issues with bots and scammers.
🛍 In its place, we will be launching “Businesses Nearby”, showcasing legitimate, verified businesses. These businesses will be able to display product catalogs and accept payments seamlessly.
✂️ We’ve also disabled new media uploads to Telegraph, our standalone blogging tool, which seems to have been misused by anonymous actors.
☝️ While 99.999% of Telegram users have nothing to do with crime, the 0.001% involved in illicit activities create a bad image for the entire platform, putting the interests of our almost billion users at risk.
✊ That’s why this year we are committed to turn moderation on Telegram from an area of criticism into one of praise.
1️⃣1️⃣ When I turned 11 in 1995, I made a promise to myself to become smarter, stronger and freer every day. Today Telegram turns 11 years old, and it’s ready to make the same commitment. Every day, Telegram should become:
✨ 🧠 smarter (more features for the people)
✨ 💪 stronger (more popularity among users)
✨ ✈️ freer (more independent and self-sufficient)
🎂 Happy birthday, Telegram!
P. S. Just 2 weeks after the last major Telegram update, we’re launching new features today — a new type of channels and 3 new ways to support content creators. Enjoy! 🌅
🤯 I was just told that I have over 100 biological kids. How is this possible for a guy who has never been married and prefers to live alone? 🤨
🔙 Fifteen years ago, a friend of mine approached me with a weird request. He said that he and his wife couldn’t have kids due to a fertility issue and asked me to donate sperm at a clinic for them to have a baby. I laughed my ass off before realizing he was dead serious 😑
👨⚕️ The boss of the clinic told me that “high quality donor material” was in short supply and that it was my civic duty to donate more sperm to anonymously help more couples. This sounded crazy enough to get me to sign up for sperm donation 🚬
🤰Fast forward to 2024, my past donating activity has helped over a hundred couples in 12 countries to have kids. Moreover, many years after I stopped being a donor, at least one IVF clinic still has my frozen sperm available for anonymous use by families who want to have kids 👧
🧬 Now I plan to open-source my DNA so that my biological children can find each other more easily. Of course, there are risks, but I don’t regret having been a donor. The shortage of healthy sperm has become an increasingly serious issue worldwide, and I’m proud that I did my part to help alleviate it 💪
🚀 I also want to help destigmatize the whole notion of sperm donation and incentivize more healthy men to do it, so that families struggling to have kids can enjoy more options. Defy convention — redefine the norm! ✊
👑9️⃣5️⃣0️⃣👑 Telegram reached 950 million monthly active users — up from 900 million in the spring. On track for ONE BILLION! 🎆
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🇰🇿 I recently returned from Kazakhstan — the economic powerhouse of Central Asia. I visited majestic Astana, vibrant Alma-Aty, picturesque Burabay, and the scenic Charyn Canyon 🥺
⬆️ The beauty of Kazakhstan can only be rivaled by its ambitions. The country attracts international companies and tech startups with business-friendly policies and favorable taxes. It also improves its edge in education and science by supporting innovative schools and universities 📘
📞 12.5 million of 20 million Kazakhs use Telegram monthly, a 25% increase from last year. We are proud to serve as the main communication platform for the Kazakh people and hope to continue to be a tool that accelerates its rapid economic and digital transformation🫡
🤑 The duck picture for the latest Telegram update is so good I printed out its full version to hang in my office 🍀
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🇺🇿 This week I visited Uzbekistan – and thoroughly enjoyed it 👍
❤️ Uzbekistan loves Telegram: over 70% of the country’s 37 million people is on Telegram and their entire economy is run on our platform (every business in the country has a Telegram bot or channel). We are proud of this popularity and we love Uzbekistan back ❤️
✨During my trip to Uzbekistan I was amazed by the modern infrastructure of quickly developing Tashkent, the mountainous landscapes of Eastern Uzbekistan, and the rich history of Buhara and Samarkand 💖
🏄♂️ I’ve met lots of young and talented people with good hearts. I am grateful for the warm welcome and hope to stay more in the sunny Tashkent later this year 😎
🇰🇬 I loved the people and nature of Kyrgyzstan — a real hidden gem of Central Asia. The weather was great, and there were no mosquitoes, so we hiked and rode horses a lot in the mountains and around the Issyk-Kul lake. I noticed that Kyrgyzstan is developing very fast, adding valuable infrastructure across the country 🚀
✊🏽 More than half of the country’s population uses Telegram monthly, and in the last four months alone, Telegram's popularity grew by 30%. While there, we met with local telecom leaders and discussed ways to improve the experience of Kyrgyz Telegram users.
Thank you, Kyrgyzstan — we will be back soon. Your hospitality inspires me for my future trips around beautiful Central Asia ❤️💛
💔 My phone got “unlocked” by the Dubai heat 🫠
👴 I’ve been using this $180 Samsung as my primary device for the last two years. I chose it because it’s one of the most widely used phones among Telegram users. I wanted to understand their experience to serve them better 🫡
But it seems I’ll have to change my phone soon 😂
4️⃣0️⃣ To celebrate my 40th birthday today, we’ve added 3 new limited edition gifts — 🎂🗓 🕯
They come from one of my favorite emoji packs — BirthdayCollection 🕯
Enjoy! 🍸
➕ Turning 40 today. Exactly 18 years ago I launched my first large project and grew it from zero to 100,000,000 users 👨🦳
Should I tell you how it happened in another “life stories” post? Feel free to vote in the meaningful poll below 🔽
#lifestories
On the 27th of August 2024, I was still in the police station in Paris. It was my third day there. With no devices or internet access, it felt like an extreme digital detox.
That day I was having my regular hours-long interview with the police. Between the questions, I asked my lawyer if my ❤️ Julia would come for questioning too. He said she was expected to, but couldn’t come. I pressed him on the reasons. “Got scared? Left Paris?”, I asked. He hesitated. “She’s pregnant,” he finally said.
It was not the answer I expected at that moment. I remained calm throughout my time in police custody, but this turn of events caught me off guard. After a pause, I said: “Thank you for the good news”. Other people present — the translator, the clerk, the policeman — produced awkward smiles.
I later learnt that the police didn’t know how to break the news of Julia’s pregnancy to me. The circumstances were not exactly celebratory. Julia was alone in a foreign country she’d never been to before. No one knew when I would be able to talk to her again.
Luckily, I was released late in the evening the next day. As I entered the rooftop terrace of the place Julia was staying at, magnificent fireworks erupted right in front of me. Below, the opening ceremony of the Paralympics had just begun.
But the mood was not festive. I learnt that while I was away, the pressure on Julia had been insane. Some blogger started a rumor that she was a “Mossad agent.” Other people came up with the nonsensical idea that it was her posts (and not my chartered flight details) that had prompted the police to welcome me at the airport.
With her devices confiscated, she couldn’t access her accounts on Telegram and Instagram for weeks. Her going radio silent on social media provoked even more speculation. Cyber-bullying aimed at her kept reaching new highs.
Julia stood strong. But, unlike me, she wasn’t used to hostility. She is not made for war.
Two days ago, she was visiting the doctor who monitored her pregnancy. I was in the middle of my 12-hour work day when Julia sent me “😭😭😭” from the doctor’s office. I instantly knew what was wrong.
🏷 Yesterday we introduced two limited-edition gifts. Both have now sold out. The entire supply of 🍭500,000 lollipops and 🌸100,000 cherry blossoms was gone within hours 😮
⚡️ We didn’t expect that to happen so fast, so we’re now working on an update to better handle sold-out items 👨💻
🛒 Should we introduce more limited-edition gifts? ❓
🔜 While we patiently wait for Google to approve the latest Telegram update, let’s take a break for some nostalgia 👨🦳
❤️ Here’s my eldest daughter instructing me on how to launch Telegram in the summer of 2013. She’s the real brain behind this whole thing, folks ☕️
🔎 Search on Telegram is more powerful than in other messaging apps because it allows users to find public channels and bots. Unfortunately, this feature has been abused by people who violated our Terms of Service to sell illegal goods.
💪 Over the last few weeks, a dedicated team of moderators, leveraging AI, has made Telegram Search much safer. All the problematic content we identified in Search is no longer accessible. If you still manage to find something unsafe or illegal in Telegram Search, please report it to us via @SearchReport.
🚫 To further deter criminals from abusing Telegram Search, we have updated our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy, ensuring they are consistent across the world. We’ve made it clear that the IP addresses and phone numbers of those who violate our rules can be disclosed to relevant authorities in response to valid legal requests.
☝️ These measures should discourage criminals. Telegram Search is meant for finding friends and discovering news, not for promoting illegal goods. We won't let bad actors jeopardize the integrity of our platform for almost a billion users.
❤️ Thanks everyone for your support and love!
Last month I got interviewed by police for 4 days after arriving in Paris. I was told I may be personally responsible for other people’s illegal use of Telegram, because the French authorities didn’t receive responses from Telegram.
This was surprising for several reasons:
1. Telegram has an official representative in the EU that accepts and replies to EU requests. Its email address has been publicly available for anyone in the EU who googles “Telegram EU address for law enforcement”.
2. The French authorities had numerous ways to reach me to request assistance. As a French citizen, I was a frequent guest at the French consulate in Dubai. A while ago, when asked, I personally helped them establish a hotline with Telegram to deal with the threat of terrorism in France.
3. If a country is unhappy with an internet service, the established practice is to start a legal action against the service itself. Using laws from the pre-smartphone era to charge a CEO with crimes committed by third parties on the platform he manages is a misguided approach. Building technology is hard enough as it is. No innovator will ever build new tools if they know they can be personally held responsible for potential abuse of those tools.
Establishing the right balance between privacy and security is not easy. You have to reconcile privacy laws with law enforcement requirements, and local laws with EU laws. You have to take into account technological limitations. As a platform, you want your processes to be consistent globally, while also ensuring they are not abused in countries with weak rule of law. We’ve been committed to engaging with regulators to find the right balance. Yes, we stand by our principles: our experience is shaped by our mission to protect our users in authoritarian regimes. But we’ve always been open to dialogue.
Sometimes we can’t agree with a country’s regulator on the right balance between privacy and security. In those cases, we are ready to leave that country. We've done it many times. When Russia demanded we hand over “encryption keys” to enable surveillance, we refused — and Telegram got banned in Russia. When Iran demanded we block channels of peaceful protesters, we refused — and Telegram got banned in Iran. We are prepared to leave markets that aren’t compatible with our principles, because we are not doing this for money. We are driven by the intention to bring good and defend the basic rights of people, particularly in places where these rights are violated.
All of that does not mean Telegram is perfect. Even the fact that authorities could be confused by where to send requests is something that we should improve. But the claims in some media that Telegram is some sort of anarchic paradise are absolutely untrue. We take down millions of harmful posts and channels every day. We publish daily transparency reports (like this or this ). We have direct hotlines with NGOs to process urgent moderation requests faster.
However, we hear voices saying that it’s not enough. Telegram’s abrupt increase in user count to 950M caused growing pains that made it easier for criminals to abuse our platform. That’s why I made it my personal goal to ensure we significantly improve things in this regard. We’ve already started that process internally, and I will share more details on our progress with you very soon.
I hope that the events of August will result in making Telegram — and the social networking industry as a whole — safer and stronger. Thanks again for your love and memes 🙏
🚩 Big day! Today we introduce the Telegram Browser and Mini App Store, plus many other innovations ✨🍬
🖥 The Browser lets users switch between viewing websites and messaging, merging communication with news consumption. It is equipped with all the features you would expect from a browser — like search, bookmarks, and multiple tabs 🤩
💎 Most importantly, Telegram Browser allows people to view decentralized websites called TON Sites. This opens the world of blockchain-based web (often called Web 3.0) to almost a billion users. To try it out, update Telegram and open a link (like tonsite://getting-started.ton) 🌐
⭐️ Users can now gift Stars to their friends, who will be directed to the Mini App Store for examples of apps that accept Stars. To check out the mini app catalog, go to the 'Apps' tab in Search 🔎
🔝 Speaking of mini apps, they have a whole new way to spread virally across the Telegram ecosystem — via Stories, which also got an upgrade today with covers and smart animated weather widgets ☀️
💪 We’re proud to ship this. Try it all yourself or check out the video demos on the blog. Enjoy your summer holidays — we’ll keep building 👨💻
🐱 Despite the fact that I am clearly a dog person, Telegram hosts the largest cat-lover community in the world — Catizen 😼
🐱 Catizen is a mini game on Telegram with over 26 million players. The game has already earned $16 million (!) from in-app purchases and donated 1% of it to rescue stray cats 😱
😄 Catizen introduced millions of people to blockchain, because it uses TON-based smart contracts for its in-game rewards. Their team also built tools for other developers to easily launch their games on Telegram and TON 🤑
👏 Well done, Catizen team — now I’m waiting for you to develop a “Dogizen”! 🐶
⚡️ 2024 will go down in history as the year when hundreds of millions of people became familiar with blockchain. We’re proud that Telegram is at the epicenter of this societal transformation 🤵
🔥To keep the fire going, this month, we will introduce a mini app store and an in-app browser with support for Web3-pages 😮
❗️ We will also step up our efforts to fight the scammers seeking to defraud new entrants into the crypto realm. Soon, Telegram will begin displaying the month of registration and principal country for public accounts (similar to Instagram). We will also allow organizations to use their mini apps to issue labels for channels, creating a decentralized marketplace for third-party verification ✔️
😏 Thanks to more transparency and decentralization, Telegram users will know more about the opportunities and the dangers of this new world 💪
🐹 Hamster Kombat has become the latest Internet phenomenon everyone's talking about. 239 million people have signed up for this Telegram mini app in just 3 months 🔥
📈 It took Hamster only 73 days to reach 100 million monthly users. Each day, 4-5 million new users join Hamster Kombat, making it the fastest-growing digital service in the world 🔝
🍆 As I said a few months back, a new wave of mini apps on Telegram is coming, and Hamster Kombat is now leading the pack. Its amazing growth shows the viral potential of the Telegram mini app platform 🦠
🍸 Soon, Hamster’s team will mint its token on TON, introducing the benefits of blockchain to hundreds of millions of people. A new era is arriving, and we are witnessing its arrival in real time 🖼
🍷 The recent Telegram update revolutionizes how people interact with mini apps. Now people can collapse apps and switch between them. In the future, this new bottom bar will also store web pages and other content for later reading.
💫 This update also introduces the ability for channel owners to publish paid photos and videos, which users can buy with Stars. Like mini app developers, channel owners can convert the Stars they collect into Toncoin, with virtually no commission from Telegram.
#️⃣ The newest version of Telegram also includes other features like hashtag and location search for public Stories. Check out the full announcement for more details!
🆒 The TapSwap mini app has taken Telegram by storm and now has 56 million users 😲
This crazy popularity was achieved in just a few months without any marketing 😎
💪 The audience of TapSwap alone is larger than that of all legacy blockchain-based projects combined. TapSwap’s team is wisely relying on Telegram for distribution and on TON to mint its upcoming token 📱
🔼TapSwap is an inspiring success story for all developers building apps on Telegram and TON. Well done – and Godspeed! ⏩
🥲 It’s getting warmer in Dubai, and my friends are leaving for fancy places like the south of France. As a French citizen, I agree that France is the best holiday destination 🇫🇷
📱 As the Telegram CEO though, I don’t take holidays. Instead, I keep working while meeting our users from unusual locations. This summer I’ve decided to check out Central Asia to see what life is like there, study how people use Telegram and what their digital needs are 📞
☕️ I will keep you posted in this channel about my discoveries 🕵️♂️
🧠 Last week, Microsoft introduced its Copilot AI bot on Telegram.
😌 I am not surprised to see big tech launching their apps on Telegram. Telegram is the only platform that is friendly to all AI developers and doesn’t impose its own competing chatbots on users.
⭐️ The new Stars payments, where Telegram takes almost no commission (less than 5%) and subsidizes ads, are not only lucrative for developers but also compliant with Apple’s and Google’s rules. That’s why we will recommend bots and mini apps that accept Stars in relevant parts of the Telegram apps.
📬 For example, we will start showing an AI section of our upcoming “Mini App Store” to businesses that are adding bots to process customer feedback. Or suggest bots that help create stickers to the users who try our Sticker Maker ⭐️
And so on. The possibilities are endless ⭐️