Original author: starzq.eth Source: X: starzqeth
When I discussed the TON ecosystem with @realyanxin last week, he recommended that I must read the interview with Telegram founder Pavel Durov this year. After reading it, I can deeply understand Telegram’s mission, the value of TON to Telegram, and why he wants to bullish the TON ecosystem, because TON is indeed an indispensable part of Telegram.
So I read this interview with Tucker Carlson, and indeed I had a deeper understanding of Telegram and Ton:
Pavel Durov's growth experience made him pursue freedom all his life, and he also hoped to create a platform so that others could feel freedom;
Telegram's mission is to create a platform that allows users to "express freedom";
Ton's value to Telegram: Ton is almost the only way to build profitability under its values, safeguarding Telegram's mission of "freedom of speech" and helping its sustainable development.
The following is the essence of the interview I compiled, and some background information/Comments/Analysis of TON, divided into 5 parts, Enjoy
Pavel Durov’s growth experience (elite family, centralized → capitalism, genius teenager, experimental school, computer programming, Russia-Ukraine conflict, defending freedom of speech) prompted Pavel to go out and pursue freedom
The birth of Telegram, based on a lean and efficient small team (the leader of various global competitions) to develop excellent functions, brought rapid tap water growth
Pavel Durov started a life like a digital nomad, and finally chose Dubai as the headquarters of Telegram
To remain neutral, Telegram There are no external shareholders, but with an operating cost of hundreds of millions of dollars each year, a profit model based on protecting user privacy must be explored. This is what TON means to Telegram.
Some interesting points: receiving contradictory demands from the US government, the greatest pressure comes from Apple and Google, how to deal with surveillance, and secure hardware communication equipment.
Pavel Durov was born in a scholar’s family in the former Soviet Union in October 1984 (a very interesting year) and witnessed the various problems of the Soviet centralized system with his own eyes.
4 When he moved to Italy with his family at the age of 10, everything he observed there was in stark contrast to his experience in the Soviet Union, and he believed that capitalism and the free market system were better than totalitarianism. The education he received in Italy also made him a part of Europe. The time in Italy was full of fun for him and his brother.
Nikolai Durov At the age of 10, as a child prodigy, he solved cubic equations live on Italian TV in real time, which was considered impossible in Italy at the time;
When Pavel first started school in Italy, he didn't know a word of Italian, and his teachers didn't think highly of him. As a result, he became the second in the class at the end of the first school year, and won the first place in the second school year. This experience made him like the competitive environment and firmly believe that as long as he worked hard, he could achieve excellent results.
Russia in the 1990s was relatively relaxed (after the collapse of the Soviet Union): Because his father was a famous scholar and writer who studied ancient Roman literature, he was invited to be the head of the Department of Classical Linguistics at the Faculty of Language and Literature of St. Petersburg State University. Russia is different from Italy, but Pavel enjoyed it because some experimental schools in Russia in the 1990s would educate you comprehensively. He learned six foreign languages and the mathematics courses were also very professional.
Pavel's family brought back an IBM PC XT computer from Italy in the early 1990s, and they became one of the few families in Russia that could teach themselves programming. Pavel was also very keen on programming. He launched an electronic library called Durov.com on the Internet for students majoring in humanities, and created an Internet forum of St. Petersburg University on SPBGU.RU, inviting teachers and students from different departments to discuss. Then, at the age of 21, he graduated from university (September 2006) and founded a company called "Russian Facebook" - VK. VK developed very quickly, and in December 2008, it surpassed its competitor Odnoklassniki to become the most popular social networking service in Russia. , and its value also grew to $3 billion.
VK began to encounter a series of problems in 2011. Because of its adherence to "free speech", VK became a tool for Russian protesters to organize rallies, rejected the Russian government's (Putin) demand to close opposition communities, and adhered to the freedom of speech and assembly it believed in. When the government demanded that the pages of opposition politicians be deleted after the Duma elections, Pavel Durov posted a photo of a husky in a hoodie on Twitter, sticking out his tongue, and the text "This is my answer" to let the world know that he would not succumb to pressure.
Similar protests took place in Ukraine in 2013, and Pavel again refused the Russian government's request to provide personal information of protesting Ukrainian users. At this time, Pavel faced two difficult choices: succumb to the Russian government or sell his shares. Durov chose the latter and left Russia in 2014. He yearned for freedom and was unwilling to be commanded.
In March 2022, Pavel said: "From my mother's side, I can trace my family lineage back to Kiev. Her maiden name was a Ukrainian surname (Ivanilenko), and to this day we have many relatives in Ukraine. " This may be one of the reasons why Pavel defends the personal information of Ukrainian users.
Carlson made up for Mark Zuckerberg and Prague Agarwal (former head of Twitter operations) who had cooperated with the government to censor public information.
In addition, Pavel Durov's family are all elites
Father: Valery Durov, a famous scholar and writer who studies ancient Roman literature, was the secretary of the party organization of Leningrad State University during the Soviet era. In the late 1980s, he was invited to teach Russian in Italy. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, he was invited to return to the Faculty of Language and Literature of St. Petersburg State University as the head of the Department of Classical Linguistics
Mother: Albina Durova (Albina Durov), from Kiev, Ukraine, teaches at St. Petersburg State University.
Brother: Nikolai Durov, a genius proficient in mathematics and computers
In 1996, 1997 and 1998, he won gold medals in three consecutive International Mathematical Olympiads (IMO);
From 1995 to 1998, he won three silver medals and one gold medal in four consecutive International Olympiads in Informatics (IOI);
As a member of the ACM team of St. Petersburg State University, he won two consecutive awards in 2000 and 2001. In 2005, he won the championship of the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ACM ICPC), an achievement only 10 people in the world have achieved; in 2005, he obtained his first doctorate from St. Petersburg State University, and in 2007, he obtained his second doctorate from the University of Bonn. Pavel Durov's right-hand man, serving as CTO of VK and Telegram. Supplement: Pavel Durov's growth experience reminds me of CZ Zhao Changpeng @cz_binance. CZ's parents are both teachers, and his father is a professor, which can be regarded as a highly educated family. Shortly after CZ was born, his father was labeled as a "bourgeois senior intellectual" and was demoted for a period of time.
In the late 1980s, 12-year-old Zhao Changpeng immigrated to Vancouver, Canada with his parents. When Zhao Changpeng went to college, he chose McGill University in Montreal to study computer science, which started his programming career.
A typical "world citizen", he lives in a different city every five years on average. He has lived in mainland China, Canada, Japan, Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of China, and Singapore.
CZ’s sister Jessica Zhao is also very good. She was once the managing director of Morgan Stanley
During his last days in Russia, due to various experiences (armed police tried to break into his house), Pavel realized that every communication tool was not safe, but he needed to contact his brother, and came up with the idea of developing a messaging application with good encryption function, which is now Telegram (iOS version launched on August 14, 2013).
Pavel was mainly responsible for the writing of the user interface, and his brother designed Telegram’s encryption algorithm MTProto protocol (still in use today), which led to the trend of "encrypted messaging applications".
The Telegram team is very lean and efficient
The engineering team has only 30 people, but all of them are very capable, just like the Navy SEALs
Based on the original TON white paper, it can be found that half of Telegram's engineering team are former VK employees, and they are also leaders in various global competitions (International Collegiate Programming Competition ACM ICPC, International Mathematical Olympiad IMO, International Collegiate Data Competition, Top Coder Competition)
There is no HR department. They created a platform (contest.com) to hold engineering competitions (monthly or bimonthly) and select the best engineers to send offers
Pavel He is the sole owner, director and product manager of the company. He came up with most of the features and worked directly with every engineer and designer responsible for implementing them (Carlson was shocked)
The secret to staying lean and efficient: independence
He once told Jack Dorsey (Twitter co-founder) that Twitter only needed 20 people. Jack agreed, but the problem was that once large-scale layoffs began, Wall Street would be uneasy, and these employees would be retained only to maintain the stock price.
So Elon needs to privatize Twitter before he can lay off 80% of the employees
So what are the benefits of going public? Pavel thought for a while and replied that it can raise funds more efficiently. So if tokens are used to raise funds, it can also achieve high efficiency and create a new evaluation system instead of the current short-term quarterly financial report system.
Telegram has 2.5 million registered users every day, and the growth rate is very fast. There is no marketing investment, and it grows completely spontaneously, with 900 million monthly active users.
Pavel believes that the fundamental reason is that "Telegram products are well made. Users are smart and like to use good things, not inferior products. Once users use it for a while and find all the functions of Telegram, including speed and security, they will not leave, and will invite their friends to join. These people will realize that the communication tools they used before are 5-6 years behind."
Jobs also has a similar view. I don’t know if it has influenced Pavel: We believe that if we continue to launch excellent products to customers, they will continue to take out their wallets. （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 an anecdote: Pavel gave a vice president of VK a large bonus, but the vice president replied that what was important to him was the mission, not the money, so the two of them folded the money into paper airplanes and threw them down the building
After visiting Berlin, Singapore, London, and San Francisco, Pavel finally chose Dubai as the headquarters of Telegram.
Reason for not choosing Berlin: There are too many bureaucratic obstacles that are difficult to overcome
Germany: You cannot directly hire employees from outside the EU. You must first place a job advertisement in local newspapers and magazines. If there are no German and EU engineers applying for the job within 6 months, you can hire employees from outside the EU
San Francisco: I thought I would stay there because there are a lot of technology companies there. Two things made Pavel reconsider
The first is security issues: Pavel was attacked on his way back to the hotel after visiting Jack Dorsey of Twitter. When he was tweeting "I just met Jack Dorsey" on his mobile phone, 3 big guys took his phone away, but Pavel He struggled to snatch it back and escaped. This shocked him, and this is the only city and country where he was attacked on the street
Second, he received too much attention from the FBI and various security agencies, "This may not be the right environment for us":
Every time Pavel went to the United States, there would be 2 FBI agents to greet him at the airport and ask questions
One time at 9 o'clock in the morning, he was having breakfast in his rented house in the United States, and the FBI suddenly appeared and questioned him about the details of his recent situation
Even once he took an engineer to the United States, someone tried to hire this engineer without his knowledge, so that this engineer could use a specific open source library in Telegram (convenient to be used as a backdoor)
Finally chose Dubai
It is very convenient to do business in Dubai. You can recruit employees from all over the world and it is easy to apply for a residence permit.
The tax policy is very good.
The infrastructure is very good. You only need to pay the minimum tax to enjoy many high-quality facilities: roads, airports, hotels.
More importantly, this is a neutral country, a small country that hopes to establish friendly relations with everyone and is not bound to any major power. This is the best choice for a neutral platform like Telegram.
Comment: Although Singapore is also relatively neutral, many people think that being too close to the mainland is also a hidden danger.
In the 7 years since they came here, although there have been some frictions with neighboring countries, the UAE has never asked Telegram to review user data, which is in sharp contrast to previous experiences.
Fun fact
After his experience in Russia and the United States, Pavel said that he would only go to places that share their values and would not get involved in 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 of Saint Kitts and Nevis in the Caribbean region of Central America by donating $250,000 to the country's sugar diversification fund (which allows visa-free travel to more than 100 countries, including the UK), and received $300 million in cash from a Swiss bank, allowing him to focus on creating Telegram.
After the outbreak of the new crown, the tourism industry in Saint Kitts and Nevis was hit, and the threshold for investment immigration was lowered. Forbes also published an article "Passports like Pavel Durov: Caribbean countries have lowered the price of citizenship due to the epidemic"
Pavel currently has citizenship of 4 countries: Russia, Saint Kitts and Nevis, France, and the United Arab Emirates
However, as the number of users of Telegram increases, the annual operating costs are as high as hundreds of millions of dollars (it owes $700 million in debt in 2021). It is impossible to rely on Pavel to provide operating funds all the time, so a series of fundraising methods have been tried. Pavel mentioned the issuance of bonds, but what is more important is the two attempts at blockchain (Pavel did not talk much about this part, probably because he wanted to keep a low profile due to the influence of the previous SEC. The following parts are all my supplements):
In January 2018, Telegram announced the launch of "Telegram Open Network" (TON), a high-performance blockchain that hopes to expand to millions of transactions per second and provide fast and secure decentralized payment, digital identity and other services to Telegram's more than 500 million users at the time. It raised $1.7 billion through the initial coin offering (ICO) to fund its construction. Participants included Silicon Valley investment firms such as Sequoia Capital, Benchmark, Kleiner Perkins and Lightspeed, and no shares in Telegram were sold.
The ICO was halted by the SEC in the first quarter of 2020. Telegram returned the funds to TON investors and paid a fine of $18.5 million to the SEC.
In March 2021, Telegram issued $1 billion in bonds with an annual interest rate of 7-8% (which looks like an emergency response to the ICO halt)
After the ICO was halted by the SEC, Pavel handed over control of TON to the "community", and an open source developer team called NewTON took over the project and changed its name to TON (The Open Network) Foundation in 2021
TON was listed on the exchange in the fourth quarter of 2021, when the price was around US$0.8.
In August 2023, Telegram launched a TON-based crypto wallet during the Token 2049 event in Singapore, available to Telegram's 900 million users worldwide. At this point, the price of Toncoin has also started to soar, and both FDV and Market Cap have entered the Top 10.
At this point, we should no longer doubt the close relationship between Telegram and TON (btw, the author of the white paper of Telegram Open Network is Pavel's brother Nikolai, who is also Telegram's CTO). TON can build a strong and healthy profit model for Telegram on the basis of protecting user privacy.
Advertising creates the main profits for social networks such as Facebook/Instagram, but Pavel Durov has been known for not liking advertising since the VK era. On the one hand, it will expose user privacy data, which directly conflicts with Telegram's mission, and on the other hand, the user experience is not good;
Currently, Telegram has opened advertising based on channel subscriptions, but because it cannot open user privacy data, it will affect the accuracy of advertising delivery, and it is difficult to generate large-scale revenue in a short period of time;
Back to the essence, Telegram is fundamentally different from Alibaba, Tencent, and Facebook. Telegram cares about anti-censorship and decentralization because of its vision of "free speech." Telegram has benchmarked itself as the international version of WeChat, and they also have similar product forms. We can make a comparative reference. Tencent's 2024 Q1 financial report shows that value-added service revenue is 45 billion yuan, financial service revenue is 23.9 billion yuan, and advertising revenue is 14.5 billion yuan. The value-added services and financial services combined are nearly five times the advertising revenue.
And its value-added services and financial services are related to payment. Now it is very clear why Telegram wants to focus on small games and support Ton: through the value-added services of small games, on the one hand, it creates huge revenue, and on the other hand, it increases user activity;
Ton essentially realizes the underlying ability of global payment for Telegram. Why not establish its own payment like WeChat? Because on the one hand, a large number of Telegram users are distributed in developing countries and may not have their own bank accounts; on the other hand, this also saves a lot of work in traditional payment integration and supervision. In other words, for Telegram A large number of users are located in long-tail small countries, each of which has several banks. Traditional payment integration is basically impossible. Only blockchain can quickly realize global payment. So choosing TON is inevitable from a certain perspective. Moreover, the anonymity of blockchain is also consistent with Telegram's vision. It is also mentioned in the biography of Musk that Musk also studied blockchain when planning to build a payment system for Twitter. However, as a US listed company, Twitter has a higher risk of supervision.
With payment, Telegram has the two most basic functions like WeChat, sending messages and sending money, and it is natural to establish various financial services.
Yan Xin has an insight that is also very interesting. Based on TON, Telegram can become the first platform that can truly promote the distribution of USDT to 1 billion people, or can democratize the interest of US dollars (on the one hand, people with US dollar accounts can easily enjoy 5% annual rate; but on the other hand, users in many parts of the world do not have bank accounts, and their own currencies are inflated)
Receiving contradictory demands from the US government
After the Capitol Hill riots on January 6, 2021 (thousands of pro-Trump protesters stormed the Capitol, resulting in casualties), Parvel received a letter from Democratic congressmen asking Telegram to provide all user information related to the riot. Pavel consulted a lawyer about this request, and the lawyer advised them to ignore the request.
The letter was very serious, stating that Telegram would violate the U.S. Constitution if it did not cooperate
Two weeks later, Parvel received a new letter from a Republican congressman, stating that Telegram would violate the U.S. Constitution if it provided any of the data requested in the previous letter
"Whatever we do, we will violate the U.S. Constitution"
Carlson added: Facebook has publicly stated that it favors certain movements and certain countries
The biggest 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
You must comply with these 2
These rules are often vague and the platform has the right to interpret
How to deal with surveillance
Pavel habitually believes that the devices he uses have been hacked. After his experience in the United States, he has very limited confidence in the security of platforms developed in the United States (iOS, Andriod, Mac OS, Windows)
How will the free exchange of information between individuals develop? Are we heading towards a world without private communication? Will privacy still exist? Especially in the era of AI, where technology is becoming more and more advanced.
Pavel is optimistic and believes that some new secure hardware communication devices will appear in the future, just like hardware wallets are used to store cryptocurrencies today. The world is developing in cycles, people always get tired of their current lifestyle and go in different directions.
10 years ago Pavel and Mark Zuckerberg had a private meeting
Pavel introduced VK's upcoming application platform. In the end, what Facebook copied was not what VK actually did, and he told Mazur during the exchange
Both parties said they would not expand into each other's market, but two or three weeks later, they both did the opposite: Facebook entered Russia, and VK also launched the global market
Finally, Pavel said that Twitter is now doing well in "free speech" and has the ability to innovate, and he regards Musk as a comrade-in-arms.
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