Pavel Durov ✔

🚫 India’s IT ministry banned Telegram for one week because some users shared leaked exam questions. This punishes 150 million ordinary Telegram users in India — not the insiders who leaked the exam materials. And the ban hasn't stopped anything. The leaks just moved to other apps. 🛡 We’ve done a lot to help fix the problem — even though its source is not Telegram. Over the past few weeks, we removed hundreds of channels sharing leaked exam materials and related scams in India. We’ve also been making the “edited” label more visible to prevent backdating scams. 🏳️ Telegram is a force for good. Banning it — even temporarily — is a mistake.

⛔️ The UK government wants to ban social media for children under 16. But banning social media for kids only puts them in greater danger. They will be pushed to use VPNs — and unlock far worse illegal content. We’ve seen this before. When the Russian government banned Telegram, 95% of Russian teenagers kept using it. They just moved to VPNs. Same in Iran. Parents already have the tools to restrict their kids’ digital habits: parental controls, screen-time limits — or no smartphone at all. 🤦‍♂️ Instead, many parents give toddlers iPads just to keep them quiet. No amount of government regulation will fix that. Under the new law, all social media users in the UK will have to “prove” they’re over 16 — with an ID, face scan or bank card. 🚨 Thousands in the UK are already arrested for political posts every year. Is this really about protecting children — or identifying more people to arrest? P. S. More about digital freedom in my speech — the source material for our $200,000 clipping contest.

🏆 Telegram is launching a $200,000 contest for content creators. 🎬 Create a video about digital freedom using ideas and footage from this speech — plus any content or ideas of your own. 📈 Pass 10,000+ organic views for a chance to win a share of the prize fund. 📣 Full details in the @contest channel.

🖥 Don't be surprised if you see tables, nested lists, inline media, formulas, headers and more in Telegram messages. 📖 We now support rich formatting for all chatbots. 🔨 Start building! Docs for chatbot devs →

🔄 Telegram’s new update is out. Lots of great new features. 😂 But most importantly: the announcement is actually fun to read.

⌚️ Telegram is now on Wear OS. Owners of Galaxy Watch, Pixel Watch, Xiaomi Watch and other smartwatches — enjoy! ☕️

⌚️ A fully native Telegram app for Apple Watch is out.

💎 TON’s native currency is becoming Gram. 🤑 Gram was the original name of TON’s currency in the first white paper. 🌱 We’re returning to our roots — and starting a new chapter. ✈️ This rebranding will pave the way for what comes next. ⏳ The transition will take around 3 weeks. 💪 TON remains the name of the blockchain. 🪙 This is step 4 of 7 to Make TON Great Again.

🎭 WhatsApp encryption is a giant fraud. 🇺🇸 The state of Texas just sued WhatsApp for lying to users about privacy — because WhatsApp employees have access to “virtually all” private messages. Now we know what WhatsApp’s founder meant when he said he “sold his users’ privacy.” Stay safe — stay Telegram! 📱

🤖 Your Telegram inbox can now run itself. Assign a bot to read and reply for you — with granular control over its rights and chat access. 🧠 ⚙️ Start building!

💪 Anyone can now prompt their own text transformation style — for example, “Gym Bro” — and turn any message into motivational protein poetry. 💪 Then share the style with friends so they can reply like gym bros too. 🤐 All fully confidential. No AI-related privacy leaks.

🧠 AI devs asked for this — and we delivered. 🤖 Bots can now talk to other bots on Telegram. 💬 Autonomous agents now have a communication layer humans can follow. 🛠 Start building!

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🏆 We just awarded $52,420 to the winners of the Telegram Art Contest. 🎨 The participants did an amazing job with the MiniDurov collectibles. 💎 Their skills and ideas will enrich Telegram’s TON-based NFT ecosystem.

🇦🇪 Dubai is full of traffic and crowds again. Already missing the Iranian fireworks — they helped clear the city of the easily impressed. The UAE’s air defenses proved excellent under fire. For 0% tax, we get better protection than Europeans paying 50%.

$100,400 just went to the 15 winners of the TON Consensus Challenge. 🧠 The smartest engineers on the planet — some armed with loyal AI sidekicks — helped us maximize the security of the new consensus mechanism. 🏆 Telegram contests offer generous prize money — and the only path to joining our engineering team.

🕵️‍♂️ Now you can search 100M+ Telegram stickers and emoji by keyword — in 36 languages. Telegram’s AI scans and labels millions of public stickers so you can finally find the exact suspicious frog you need. 🤔

🌍 With 400 validators across 6 continents, TON is one of the most decentralized blockchain networks on the planet. 🧑‍💻 Telegram becoming the largest validator opened the door for major exchanges and custodians to stake TON without increasing centralization risk.

🛠 Developing for TON just became 10x faster. The new toolchain makes smart contracts easy to create, test, and deploy. Most importantly, fully AI-ready. It replaces TON’s fragmented tooling stack with one developer flow. Start building!