reposted by Telegram创始人: 以「言论自由」为使命，视马斯克为战友，以 TON 为基础构建盈利模式 - by starzq
TON is almost the only way to build profitability under Telegram’s values, ensuring its mission of “freedom of speech” and helping it achieve sustainable development.
Last week, while discussing the TON ecosystem with Yan Xin, he strongly recommended that I check out an interview of Telegram founder Pavel Durov with Tucker Carlson this year—a rare three-hour face-to-face conversation. After watching it, I gained a deeper understanding of Telegram’s mission and the value of TON to Telegram, as well as why he is bullish on the TON ecosystem, since TON is indeed an indispensable part of Telegram.
So, I went through the interview and truly came to a more profound understanding of both Telegram and TON:
Pavel Durov’s background has driven him to pursue freedom throughout his life, and he hopes to create a platform that allows others to feel that freedom as well.
The mission of Telegram is to create a platform that enables users to enjoy “freedom of speech.”
The value of TON to Telegram: TON is almost the only way to build profitability under its values, ensuring Telegram’s mission of “freedom of speech” and helping it achieve sustainable development.
Below are the highlights from the interview, along with some background information, comments, and an analysis of TON, divided into five parts. Enjoy!
Pavel Durov’s upbringing (elite family, transitioning from centralization to capitalism, a child prodigy, experimental schools, computer programming, the Russia-Ukraine conflict, and defending freedom of speech) prompted his departure in pursuit of freedom.
The birth of Telegram was based on a small, efficient team (winners of various global competitions) developing excellent features, leading to rapid organic growth.
Pavel Durov embraced a digital nomad lifestyle and ultimately chose Dubai as the headquarters of Telegram.
To maintain neutrality, Telegram has no external shareholders, but it must explore a profitability model that protects user privacy, which is the significance of TON for Telegram.
Some interesting points include facing contradictory demands from the U.S. government, the greatest pressures coming from Apple and Google, and how to handle surveillance and secure hardware communication devices.
- Pavel Durov’s upbringing (from an elite family, transitioning from centralization to capitalism, a child prodigy, experimental schools, computer programming, the Russia-Ukraine conflict, and defending freedom of speech) led him to seek freedom.
Pavel Durov was born in October 1984 (a rather fascinating year) into a scholarly family in the former Soviet Union, where he witnessed firsthand the various issues of the Soviet centralization system.
At the age of four, he moved to Italy with his family, where everything he observed sharply contrasted with his experiences in the Soviet Union, leading him to believe that capitalism and a free market system were superior to centralization. The education he received in Italy also helped him become a part of Europe.
His time in Italy was filled with joy for both him and his brother.
Nikolai Durov, at the age of ten, astounded Italian television audiences by solving cubic equations live—something that was considered impossible at the time in Italy.
When Pavel first started school, he couldn’t speak a word of Italian, and the teachers had little faith in him. By the end of his first year, he had risen to second in his class, and in the second year, he achieved first place. This experience sparked his love for a competitive environment and instilled in him a belief that hard work could lead to excellent results.
In the relatively relaxed Russia of the 1990s (after the collapse of the Soviet Union): Pavel’s father, a renowned scholar and writer of ancient Roman literature, was invited to become the head of the Department of Classical Linguistics at St. Petersburg State University’s Faculty of Philology. Russia was different from Italy, but Pavel enjoyed it, as some experimental schools in 1990s Russia provided a broad education, allowing him to learn six foreign languages and receive a very professional education in mathematics.
In the early 1990s, Pavel’s family brought back an IBM PC XT computer from Italy, making them one of the few families in Russia capable of self-learning programming. Pavel was very enthusiastic about programming and launched an electronic library named Durov.com for humanities students online. He also created an internet forum for St. Petersburg State University on SPBGU.RU, inviting faculty and students from various departments to engage in discussions. At the age of 21, he graduated from university (September 2006) and founded a company known as VK, often referred to as the “Russian Facebook.” VK grew rapidly, and by December 2008, it surpassed its competitor Odnoklassniki to become Russia’s most popular social networking service, with a valuation reaching $3 billion.
Starting in 2011, VK began facing a series of challenges. Upholding “freedom of speech,” VK became a tool for organizing protests in Russia, resisting demands from the Russian government (Putin) to shut down opposition communities, firmly standing by its belief in freedom of speech and assembly. During similar protests in Ukraine in 2013, Pavel again refused the Russian government’s requests to provide personal information about Ukrainian protesters. At that time, Pavel faced a dilemma: submit to the Russian government or sell his shares. Durov chose the latter, leaving Russia in 2014 to pursue his longing for freedom and unwillingness to be controlled.
Carlson also pointed out that Mark Zuckerberg and Parag Agrawal (former Twitter COO) had collaborated with the government to censor public information.
Addition 1: In 2011, when the government demanded the removal of opposition politicians’ pages after the Duma elections, Pavel Durov tweeted a picture of a husky wearing a hoodie with its tongue out, captioned “This is my reply,” letting the world know that he would not yield to pressure.
Addition 2: In March 2022, Pavel stated, “From my mother’s side, I can trace my family lineage back to Kyiv. Her maiden name is Ukrainian (Ivanenko), and to this day, we have many relatives in Ukraine.” This may also be one of the reasons why Pavel defends the personal information of Ukrainian users.
Pavel Durov’s family is comprised of elites.
Father: Valery Durov, a prominent scholar and writer specializing in ancient Roman literature. During the Soviet era, he served as the secretary of the Communist Party organization at Leningrad State University. In the late 1980s, he was invited to Italy to teach Russian. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, he was invited back to St. Petersburg State University to serve as the head of the Department of Classical Linguistics at the Faculty of Philology.
Mother: Albina Durova, originally from Kyiv, Ukraine, who teaches at St. Petersburg State University.
Brother: Nikolai Durov, a child prodigy with expertise in mathematics and computer science. He won gold medals in the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) in 1996, 1997, and 1998, achieving this feat consecutively across three years. From 1995 to 1998, he earned three silver medals and one gold medal in the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI), participating in four consecutive competitions. As a member of the St. Petersburg State University ACM team, he won the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ACM ICPC) championship finals in 2000 and 2001, making him one of only ten individuals worldwide to achieve this. In 2005, he earned his first doctoral degree from St. Petersburg State University and obtained a second doctoral degree from the University of Bonn in 2007.
Pavel Durov’s right-hand man, he serves as the CTO of VK and Telegram.
Additional Note: Pavel Durov’s upbringing reminds me of CZ Zhao Changpeng. CZ’s parents were both teachers, with his father being a professor, indicating a well-educated family background. Shortly after CZ was born, his father was labeled an “upper-class intellectual” and was sent to work in a less prestigious position for some time.
In the late 1980s, 12-year-old Zhao followed his parents when they immigrated to Vancouver, Canada. For university, he chose to study computer science at McGill University in Montreal, marking the beginning of his programming career.
CZ is also a quintessential “global citizen,” averaging a move to a new city every five years, having lived in mainland China, Canada, Japan, Hong Kong, and Singapore.
CZ’s sister, Jessica Zhao, is also highly accomplished, having previously served as a managing director at Morgan Stanley.
- The Birth of Telegram: A Compact and Efficient Team Developing Outstanding Features Leading to Rapid Organic Growth
In the final days in Russia, due to various experiences (including armed police attempting to break into his home), Pavel realized that no communication tool was entirely safe. However, he needed to stay in contact with his brother, which sparked the idea to develop a messaging application with excellent encryption features—this is now known as Telegram, which was launched on iOS on August 14, 2013.
Pavel primarily focused on creating the user interface, while his brother devised the encryption protocol, MTProto, which is still in use today and has set a trend for “encrypted messaging applications.”
The Telegram team is notably compact and efficient.
The engineering team consists of only 30 people, each highly skilled and comparable to Navy SEALs.
Based on the original TON whitepaper, it can be seen that nearly half of Telegram’s engineering team were former employees of VK, also excelling in various global competitions (such as the ACM ICPC, International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO), International Collegiate Programming Contest, and TopCoder competitions).
There is no HR department; instead, they created a platform (contest.com) for hosting engineering competitions (monthly or bi-monthly) to select the best engineers to extend job offers.
Pavel is the sole owner, director, and product manager of the company. Most of the features were proposed by him, and he directly collaborates with each engineer and designer responsible for implementing these features (Carlson was amazed).
The secret to maintaining a compact and efficient team: Independence.
He once told Jack Dorsey (co-founder of Twitter) that Twitter only needed 20 people. Jack agreed, but the issue is that once large-scale layoffs begin, it could cause anxiety on Wall Street. Keeping those employees merely maintains the stock price.
Thus, Elon needed to privatize Twitter first to lay off 80% of the staff.
So, what are the benefits of being publicly traded? After some thought, Pavel replied that it allows for more efficient fundraising. Therefore, if funds were raised through tokens, this could achieve efficiency while creating a new evaluation system, rather than the current short-term quarterly report system.
Telegram sees about 2.5 million user registrations daily, experiencing rapid growth. Without any marketing expenditure, it has grown entirely organically, now boasting 900 million monthly active users.
Pavel believes the fundamental reason is that “Telegram provides a great product. Users are smart; they like using good tools and dislike inferior ones. Once they use Telegram for a while and discover all its features—including speed and security—they won’t leave and will invite their friends to join. These new users will realize that the communication tools they were previously using have been outdated by 5–6 years.”
Steve Jobs had a similar view, though it is unclear if this influenced Pavel: “Our belief was that if we kept putting great products in front of customers, they would continue to open their wallets.”
The paper airplane logo comes from a story:
Pavel once gave a significant bonus to a vice president at VK, but the vice president replied that what mattered to him was the mission, not the money. They then folded the cash into paper airplanes and threw them out of the window.
Pavel Durov Embarks on a Digital Nomad Lifestyle, Ultimately Choosing Dubai as Telegram’s Headquarters
Pavel traveled to Berlin, Singapore, London, and San Francisco before finally selecting Dubai as the headquarters for Telegram.
Reasons for not choosing Berlin: The bureaucratic barriers were simply too numerous to overcome.
In Germany, you cannot directly hire employees from outside the EU. You must first publish job advertisements in local newspapers and magazines, and if there are no applications from German or EU engineers within six months, you may then hire employees from outside the EU.
San Francisco: He initially thought he would stay there due to the concentration of tech companies. However, two events made Pavel reconsider.
First was the safety issue: After visiting Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, Pavel was attacked on the way back to his hotel. While tweeting, “I just met Jack Dorsey,” three large individuals snatched his phone, but Pavel fought back and managed to escape. This shocked him, as it was the only city where he had been attacked in public.
Second, he received excessive attention from the FBI and various security agencies, leading him to conclude that “this might not be the right environment for us.”
Every time Pavel traveled to the U.S., there would be two FBI agents waiting for him at the airport to question him.
Once, while having breakfast at his rented home in the U.S. at 9 AM, the FBI unexpectedly showed up to inquire about his well-being.
On another occasion, when he brought an engineer to the U.S., someone attempted to hire the engineer without his knowledge, intending for the engineer to use specific open-source libraries on Telegram (which could easily be backdoored).
Ultimately, he chose Dubai.
Seven years ago, they came to Dubai, initially planning to stay for just six months, but they ended up not leaving.
Business in Dubai is very convenient:
You can hire employees globally, and applying for residency permits is straightforward.
The tax policies are favorable.
The infrastructure is excellent. With minimal taxes, you can enjoy high-quality facilities, including roads, airports, and hotels.
More importantly, it is a neutral country—a small nation that seeks to build friendly relations with everyone and is not aligned with any major powers, making it the best choice for a neutral platform like Telegram.
Comment: While Singapore is also relatively neutral, many believe its proximity to the mainland poses some risks.
In the seven years they have been in Dubai, there have been some tensions with neighboring countries, but the UAE has never required Telegram to censor user data, a stark contrast to his previous experiences.
Fun Fact:
After his experiences in Russia and the United States, Pavel stated that he would only go to places that align with his values and would avoid major countries like China, Russia, and the United States. This interview was also conducted at Telegram’s Dubai office.
After leaving Russia, Pavel obtained citizenship in Saint Kitts and Nevis, a Caribbean nation, by donating
250,000 to a sugar industry diversification fund (allowing visa-free travel to over 100 countries, including the UK).
Heals Secured 300 million in cash from a Swiss bank, enabling him to focus on creating Telegram.
Following the outbreak of COVID-19, St. Kitts and Nevis’s tourism sector was hit hard, lowering the thresholds for investment immigration. Forbes even published an article titled, “Passports like Pavel Durov: Caribbean Nations Lower Citizenship Prices Due to Pandemic.”
Pavel currently holds citizenship in four countries: Russia, St. Kitts and Nevis, France, and the UAE.
To Maintain Its Neutrality, Telegram Has No External Shareholders, but It Must Explore a Revenue Model Based on User Privacy Due to Its Hundreds of Millions of Dollars in Annual Operating Costs—This Is the Significance of TON for Telegram.
Learning from the experience of VK (which was sold to Russians due to capital control), Telegram initially refrained from bringing in third-party investment firms to maintain its independence, as its mission of “freedom of speech” may not align with the interests of investors.
At the same time, Pavel was able to fund Telegram’s early operations: ten years ago, he had hundreds of millions of dollars in his bank account and Bitcoin (he bought 2,000 bitcoins for 1.5 million at an average price of 750 each). He did not purchase any real estate, planes, or yachts, believing such investments did not suit him. The priority in his life is his freedom; buying things would tie him to a location, and he wanted to focus all his energy on Telegram.
However, as Telegram’s user base grew, its annual operating costs skyrocketed to hundreds of millions of dollars (in 2021, it owed $700 million). It was not feasible to rely on Pavel for operational funding indefinitely, so the company explored a series of fundraising methods. Pavel mentioned issuing bonds, but more importantly, there were two significant attempts related to blockchain (this part was less discussed by Pavel, possibly due to prior SEC influences that led him to keep a low profile; the following details are my supplementary notes):
In January 2018, Telegram announced the launch of the “Telegram Open Network” (TON), a high-performance blockchain designed to handle millions of transactions per second to provide Telegram’s then 500 million users with fast, secure, decentralized payment and digital identity services. Through an Initial Coin Offering (ICO), they raised $1.7 billion to fund its development. Investors included prominent Silicon Valley firms, such as Sequoia Capital, Benchmark, Kleiner Perkins, and Lightspeed, without selling any shares of Telegram.
This ICO was halted by the SEC in the first quarter of 2020. Telegram refunded the funds to TON investors and paid a $18.5 million fine to the SEC.
In March 2021, Telegram issued $1 billion in bonds with an annual interest rate of 7-8% (which seemed like a hurried response to the ICO’s suspension).
After the SEC halted the ICO, Pavel handed control of TON over to the “community.” An open-source developer team named NewTON took over the project and renamed it the TON (The Open Network) Foundation in 2021.
TON was listed on exchanges in the fourth quarter of 2021, when its price was around $0.80.
In August 2023, during the Token2049 event in Singapore, Telegram launched a TON-based crypto wallet for its 900 million users worldwide. Since then, the price of Toncoin has surged, with its Fully Diluted Valuation (FDV) and Market Cap entering the Top 10.
At this point, we should no longer doubt the close relationship between Telegram and TON (by the way, the author of the Telegram Open Network white paper is Pavel’s brother Nikolai, who is also the CTO of Telegram). TON can help Telegram build a robust and healthy revenue model based on user privacy.
The revenue models for internet platforms can be categorized as follows: advertisements, e-commerce physical sales, value-added services (such as virtual goods sales and memberships), and financial services.
Advertisements create the primary profits for social networks like Facebook and Instagram. However, Pavel Durov has been known for his dislike of advertisements since his time at VK, as they both expose user privacy data—which directly conflicts with Telegram’s mission—and provide a poor user experience.
Currently, Telegram has opened up advertising based on channel subscriptions, but because it cannot disclose user privacy data, it impacts the precision of ad placements, making it challenging to generate substantial revenue in the short term.
Returning to the essence, Telegram is fundamentally different from companies like Alibaba, Tencent, and Facebook. Telegram places significant importance on anti-censorship and decentralization due to its vision of “freedom of speech.” Telegram positions itself as the international version of WeChat, and while they have similar product forms, we can draw a comparative reference. Tencent’s Q1 2024 financial report shows that its revenue from value-added services reached 45 billion yuan, financial services generated 23.9 billion yuan, and advertisement revenue totaled 14.5 billion yuan. The combined revenue from value-added services and financial services is nearly five times the revenue from advertisements.
Both the value-added services and financial services are related to payments, which makes it very clear why Telegram is focusing on mini-games and supporting TON.
Through value-added services from mini-games, Telegram can generate massive revenue while also enhancing user engagement.
TON essentially provides Telegram with the foundational capability for global payments. Why not establish its own payment system like WeChat? On one hand, many of Telegram’s users are located in developing countries, where they may not even have their own bank accounts. On the other hand, this approach avoids the substantial work involved in traditional payment integration and regulation. In other words, for the long-tail small countries where many Telegram users are located, each of these countries has several banks, making traditional payment integration practically impossible. Only blockchain can quickly enable global payments. Therefore, choosing TON is, in some respects, inevitable. Moreover, the anonymity of blockchain aligns with Telegram’s vision.
Elon Musk mentioned in his biography that he explored blockchain while planning to establish a payment system for Twitter. However, as a publicly traded company in the U.S., Twitter faces greater regulatory risks.
With payments in place, Telegram will have the two most fundamental functions, like WeChat: sending messages and sending money, making it straightforward to establish various financial services.
Yan Xin has an intriguing insight: based on TON, Telegram could become the first platform capable of truly distributing USDT to a billion people, or in other words, democratizing dollar interest. On one hand, those with dollar accounts can easily enjoy a 5% annual rate; on the other hand, many users around the world lack bank accounts and face severe inflation in their local currencies.
- Some Interesting Points: Conflicting Demands from the U.S. Government, Pressure from Apple and Google, Attitudes Toward Surveillance, and Secure Hardware Communication Devices
Conflicting Demands from the U.S. Government
After the Capitol riots on January 6, 2021, when thousands of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol building, resulting in casualties, Pavel received a letter from Democratic members of Congress requesting Telegram to provide all user information related to the incident. Pavel consulted with a lawyer about this request, who advised them to ignore it.
The letter was very serious, stating that failure to comply would result in Telegram violating the U.S. Constitution.
Two weeks later, Pavel received another letter, this time from Republican members of Congress, stating that if Telegram provided any data requested in the previous letter, it would also violate the U.S. Constitution.
“No matter what we do, we will violate the U.S. Constitution.”
Carlson pointed out that Facebook openly expresses bias toward certain movements and countries.
Pressure from Apple and Google
The greatest pressure does not come from the government but from Apple and Google.
These two platforms can censor all the content you can read and access on your smartphone.
Telegram must comply with the rules of these two platforms, or it risks being removed from their app stores.
These rules are often vague, and the platforms have the authority to interpret them.
Attitudes Toward Surveillance
Pavel habitually assumes that the devices he uses have been compromised. After his experiences in the U.S., he has very limited confidence in the security of platforms developed in the U.S. (iOS, Android, Mac OS, Windows).
How will the free exchange of information between individuals evolve? Are we moving toward a world without private communication? Will privacy still exist, especially in an increasingly advanced AI era?
Pavel is relatively optimistic, believing that new secure hardware communication devices will emerge in the future, much like hardware wallets are used to store cryptocurrencies today. The world develops in cycles, and people will inevitably grow tired of their current way of life and move in different directions.
Ten years ago, Pavel had a private meeting with Mark Zuckerberg.
Pavel introduced the upcoming app platform for VK. In the end, Facebook didn’t copy what VK was actually doing, but he did inform Zuckerberg about it during their conversation.
Both parties stated they would not expand into each other’s markets, but two or three weeks later, they both did the opposite: Facebook entered Russia, and VK launched in the global market.
Finally, Pavel remarked that Twitter is currently doing well in terms of “freedom of speech” and has the capacity for innovation; he considers Musk to be an ally.
