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 🚀

📈 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. 🛡