Du Rove's Channel

🥲 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 🕵️‍♂️

💔 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 😂

🧠 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 ⭐️

Big day today, we’re launching Telegram Stars ⭐️ – a way to pay for digital services in mini-apps. Unlike old-school apps, Telegram mini apps like Notcoin don’t need to be installed for use. That’s why they grow so quickly. In addition, Telegram’s social nature allows mini apps to spread virally, so they reach tens of millions of users within weeks ⚡️ ⭐️ With Telegram Stars, mini apps can now accept payments for digital services using the simplest payment method possible – in-app purchases on Android and iOS 💳 Mini app developers can withdraw their Stars via Fragment using TON. They can also use Stars to further promote their apps on Telegram — on preferential terms! 👛 Apple and Google take a 30% cut when users buy Stars from them, but Telegram will subsidize ads purchased with Telegram Stars. So if developers reinvest Stars in promoting their app, the overall commission will be nearly 0%! As a result, launching apps on Telegram makes more economic sense than launching traditional mobile apps 📈 The recent mini app boom has already made Telegram the main destination to launch new apps. Stars and ad subsidies bring this to a new level – unprecedented in the history of social media 😏

💎 The $6 million worth of Notcoin donated to m 2 weeks ago has increased in price 4 times and is now valued at $24 million 📈 🚀 The daily trading volume of Notcoin reached $4 billion yesterday, making it one of the top 5 most-traded cryptocurrencies in the world 🏅 🪙 Millions of people earned money on Notcoin just by using a mini app in Telegram — and now they keep earning more. While the Notcoin mini app is accessed via Telegram, the Notcoin cryptocurrency is minted on TON — the only blockchain technology that is truly scalable and can support a new wave of super popular projects 🔋 💪 A month ago, Notcoin was the largest cryptocurrency community in the history of social media. Today, the Notcoin community is rivaled only by projects it inspired — similar mini apps on Telegram that are allowing tens of millions of users to benefit 🫰 🫡 We are proud to be the platform that serves the people.

🆕 Last week brought us another big Telegram update that includes message effects, captions above photos, hashtag search, collapsible quotes, actions for phone numbers in messages and more. 💖 My favorite new addition is Message Effects — a feature you voted for in this channel. Press and hold on the “Send” button after typing a message to choose a colorful message effect. We added over 500 ❗️ message effects that you can attach to any message you send in 1-on-1 chats. 👉 Something even bigger is set to launch this week, so stay tuned!

🪙 Half a million Notcoin users donated me $6.8 million worth of Notcoin! Thank you ☺️ 📈 I will hold these coins until they turn to $680M, at which point I will use them to buy more servers for Telegram 🏭 #WealthGapWidens #RichGetRicher #DisparityGrows #SubsidizeTheRich #TaxThePoor 😆 (later this month, tapping on such hashtags will show all public channel posts containing them).

🪙 Half a million Notcoin users donated me $6.8 million worth of Notcoin! Thank you ☺️ 📈 I will hold these coins until they turn to $680M, at which point I will use them to buy more servers for Telegram 🏭 #WealthGapWidens #RichGetRicher #DisparityGrows #SubsidizeTheRich #TaxThePoor 😆 (later this month, tapping on such hashtags will show all public channel posts containing them).

💎 Notcoin, a miniapp on Telegram, reached 35M active users in just a few months. 🐸 In this app, users could earn a game currency “notcoins” by clicking on the screen. Yesterday, the cryptocurrency Notcoin was minted on the TON blockchain and listed on all major cryptoexchanges. All of a sudden, Notcoin users who just played this game for fun could convert their in-game currency into real money 🤑 🚀 Notcoin instantly became a top-10 cryptocurrency in the world by trading volume, and reached almost $700 million in market capitalization. Imagine — hundreds of millions of dollars in value were created for Telegram users in this miniapp out of nowhere in a matter of months 😲 💪 This amazing success story shows how powerful the Telegram / TON ecosystems are for app developers. Telegram offers app developers more freedom than any other platform, providing unmatched opportunities to leverage social interactions for viral distribution. TON, in turn, provides scale and flexibility for any blockchain project on top of it 💎 We are now seeing a large wave of new miniapps being built on Telegram and TON. Notcoin, the leader of the pack, used its mighty paws to pave the way for many apps to come 🐺

🤫 A story shared by Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter, uncovered that the current leaders of Signal, an allegedly “secure” messaging app, are activists used by the US state department for regime change abroad 🥷 🥸 The US government spent $3M to build Signal’s encryption, and today the exact same encryption is implemented in WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Google Messages and even Skype. It looks almost as if big tech in the US is not allowed to build its own encryption protocols that would be independent of government interference 🐕‍🦺 🕵️‍♂️ An alarming number of important people I’ve spoken to remarked that their “private” Signal messages had been exploited against them in US courts or media. But whenever somebody raises doubt about their encryption, Signal’s typical response is “we are open source so anyone can verify that everything is all right”. That, however, is a trick 🤡 🕵️‍♂️ Unlike Telegram, Signal doesn’t allow researchers to make sure that their GitHub code is the same code that is used in the Signal app run on users’ iPhones. Signal refused to add reproducible builds for iOS, closing a GitHub request from the community. And WhatsApp doesn’t even publish the code of its apps, so all their talk about “privacy” is an even more obvious circus trick 💤 🛡 Telegram is the only massively popular messaging service that allows everyone to make sure that all of its apps indeed use the same open source code that is published on Github. For the past ten years, Telegram Secret Chats have remained the only popular method of communication that is verifiably private 💪