⭐ Happy Chinese New Year!

Following the success of the Chinese startup DeepSeek, many are surprised at how quickly China has caught up with the US in AI. However, China’s progress in algorithmic efficiency hasn't come out of nothing. Chinese students have long outperformed others in math and programming at international olympiads 🏆

When it comes to producing outstanding performers in math and science, China's secondary education system is superior to that of the West. It fosters fierce competition among students, a principle borrowed from the highly efficient Soviet model 🎖

In contrast, most Western schools discourage competition, prohibiting public announcements of students' grades and rankings. The rationale is understandable — to protect students from pressure or ridicule. However, such measures also predictably demotivate the best students. Victory and defeat are two sides of the same coin. Eliminate the losers — and you eliminate the winners ☯️

For many students, motivation to excel in high school comes from treating it as a competitive game, striving to rank first against strong opponents. Removing transparency in student performance can make school feel meaningless for ambitious teenagers. It’s not surprising that many gifted kids now find competitive gaming more exciting than academics — at least in video games, they can see how each player ranks 😵

Telling all students they are champions, regardless of performance, may seem kind — until you consider how quickly reality will shatter this illusion after graduation. Reality, unlike well-meaning school policies, does have public grades and rankings — whether in sports, business, science, or technology. AI benchmarks that demonstrate DeepSeek's superiority are one of such public rankings. And more are coming. Unless the US secondary education system undergoes radical reform, China’s growing dominance in technology seems inevitable 🇨🇳

Telegram’s third major update this year is out. With it, we’re taking another step towards supporting our own video platform: meet video covers, saved progress, and timestamp sharing 😏

And don’t miss the new AI-powered sticker search! Now, you can intuitively find the perfect fit from millions of user-created stickers in 29 languages. We’ll continue expanding the index in future updates — once we clean out the not-so-kosher (and not-so-halal) ones 🦶

Over the past 5 weeks, thousands of users asked us to add new gifts 🎁

So today, we’re launching 9 limited-edition gifts: 🎁🎁🎁🎁🎁🎁🎁🎁🎁

And 4 of them 🎁🎁🎁🎁 can be instantly upgraded into unique collectibles👑

Happy Valentine’s Day!💖

It took 6 minutes for this entire collection to sell out. People paid over $200 for each of the 2000 hearts. $400,000 in 6 minutes 😎

15,000 Loot Bags costing about $50 each sold in 24 minutes, $750,000 total. Once minted, they turn into insanely beautiful art pieces 🫠

In just one hour, all the rings are gone ⛔️
35,000 items, ~$20 each. That’s $700,000 in sales — while most people were asleep 💤
At this rate, we’ll run out of Valentine’s gifts in no time.
Are they too cheap? 🧐

All nine Valentine’s gifts sold out within a few hours, totaling over $5M.
We’ll have to release more — can’t have our American users waking up to empty shelves 😑

#️⃣ I wrote about MemHash earlier — a mini app single-handedly built over a weekend. It inspired dozens of copycats and established an entirely new genre of mining mini apps on Telegram.

📈 MemHash proved there’s always room for a new app on Telegram — provided you deeply understand which features made its predecessors popular. The key is to borrow only what works while innovating and differentiating elsewhere 💡

✉️ This is exactly how Telegram itself became popular. We didn’t invent messaging, but in 2013, we took only what was necessary from existing apps. Then, by continuously listening to users and innovating, we introduced hundreds of new useful features over 12 years. This not only brought Telegram immense popularity but also helped establish a new genre of messaging 💭

💡 I know Telegram’s success story inspired the creator of MemHash, and I hope future app creators will draw inspiration from us as well. Good luck! 🍀

📰 As you may have heard, I’ve returned to Dubai after spending several months in France due to an investigation related to the activity of criminals on Telegram. The process is ongoing, but it feels great to be home 🇦🇪

🙏 I want to thank the investigative judges for letting this happen, as well as my lawyers and team for their relentless efforts in demonstrating that, when it comes to moderation, cooperation, and fighting crime, for years Telegram not only met but exceeded its legal obligations 💼

🤲 I’m also deeply grateful for the millions of people around the world who have shown their support throughout this unexpected journey — it has meant a lot. There is nothing our billion-strong community can't overcome 🚀

🏆 Telegram now has significantly over 1 billion monthly active users, becoming the second most popular messaging app in the world (excluding the China-specific WeChat) 🥈

🔼User engagement is also rising. On average, each user opens Telegram 21 times daily and spends 41 minutes on the app every day. Meanwhile, our revenue growth has exploded, with $547M in profit in 2024 💵

😺 Ahead of us stands WhatsApp — a cheap, watered-down imitation of Telegram. For years, they’ve desperately tried to copy our innovations while burning billions on lobbying and PR campaigns to slow us down. They failed. Telegram grew, became profitable, and — unlike our competitor — retained its independence 🗽

✉️ We are just getting started 😏

📈 Good month for The Open Network: the biggest names in venture capital invested over $400M into TON and publicly backed it. Among them are the legends of Silicon Valley: Sequoia, Benchmark, Ribbit, Draper, VY, and other world-famous funds 💸

🪙 Over the past year, TON has become the backbone of creator economy on Telegram. It is the exclusive withdrawal method for millions of content creators and mini app developers and the only way to pay for Telegram Ads in most countries. Every Telegram-related asset — from usernames to digital gifts — is tradeable solely as a TON-based NFT, and Telegram Mini Apps use TON exclusively as their blockchain. Telegram’s in-app economy is exploding in volume, fueled by constant innovation — like the Star Messages we launched earlier this month, an overnight success rivaled only by the tokenized gifts introduced in January 🎁

⛏️ What’s more, The Open Network remains the only blockchain technology built to scale — with sharding and the capacity to process transactions for billions of users. It’s one of the few blockchain networks with real, fundamental value. I’m not surprised the smartest people on the planet are endorsing TON 🚀

💭 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 sharply as Peter, Micky, and Tim — and most of the others have 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 💫

📈 Telegram bonds are trading at all-time highs (adjusted for the federal funds rate).
We issued bonds four years ago — at a time when Telegram had zero revenue and half the user base we have today.

💸Now, with over 1 billion monthly active users and substantial profit, it's no surprise our bonds are performing well.

🏦 What makes the difference is our bondholders: some of the world’s most reputable global funds. Their continued support helps Telegram stay independent and grow stronger in any economic environment 💪

📰 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. 🗓

🎁🎁 Happy Easter — the day of Freedom and Rebirth! 🎁

😲 Last month, France nearly banned encryption. A law requiring messaging apps to implement a backdoor for police access to private messages was passed by the Senate. Luckily, it was shot down by the National Assembly. Yet 3 days ago the Paris Police Prefect advocated for it again. 🤦‍♂️

The members of the National Assembly were wise to reject a law that would have made France the first country in the world to strip its citizens of their right to privacy. Even countries that many Europeans view as lacking in freedoms have never banned encryption. Why?

Because it’s technically impossible to guarantee that only the police can access a backdoor. Once introduced, a backdoor can be exploited by other parties — from foreign agents to hackers. As a result, the private messages of all law abiding citizens can get compromised.

Aimed at preventing drug trafficking, the law wouldn’t have helped fight crime anyway. Even if mainstream encrypted apps had been weakened by a backdoor, criminals could still communicate securely through dozens of smaller apps — and become even harder to trace due to VPNs.

This is why, as I’ve said before, Telegram would rather exit a market than undermine encryption with backdoors and violate basic human rights. Unlike some of our competitors, we don’t trade privacy for market share.

In it’s 12-year history, Telegram has never disclosed a single byte of private messages. In accordance with the EU Digital Services Act, if provided with a valid court order, Telegram would only disclose the IP addresses and phone numbers of criminal suspects — not messages.

Last month, freedom prevailed. But it was a reminder: we must keep explaining to lawmakers that encryption isn’t built to protect criminals — it protects the privacy and safety of ordinary people. Losing that protection would be tragic.

The battle is far from over. This month, the European Commission proposed a similar initiative to add backdoors to messaging apps. No country is immune to the slow erosion of freedoms. Every day, those freedoms come under attack — and every day, we must defend them. 🛡

🎆 The sky over Dubai has never looked as good as it did today! 🔵

📞 Telegram's latest update brings you ultra-secure group calls. They are protected not just with end-to-end encryption — but with blockchain-like technology to ensure that no one can secretly join as a listener! 🤫

🧠 You can now add up to 200 people to any Telegram call (including 1-1 calls) using links, QR-codes, or direct invitations. And if you need to go beyond 200 members in a call, Telegram voice and video chats in groups support tens of thousands participants. 📣

🎁 We’ve just launched the Telegram Gift Marketplace, so you can instantly buy gifts from other users or sell your own. Telegram Gifts are NFTs — unique collectibles on the TON blockchain. Initially sold for just a few dollars, some of them are now worth tens of thousands 💰