Telegram (software)

• 1. Introduction

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  In March 2025, Pavel Durov announced that Telegram, the messaging service he built with his brother Nikolai, had passed one billion monthly active users. The app began as two quiet phone releases. The iOS version arrived on the 14th of August 2013, and the Android version followed on the 20th of October 2013. Today it carries private chats, giant public groups, one-way broadcast channels, video calls, payments and games. Yet it stays oddly hard to pin down. Who are the brothers behind it, and why do they leave so few traces of where they work? How does an app grow by hundreds of millions of people without a traditional advertising machine? How private is a service that advertises privacy, and what do independent cryptographers make of it? Who pays for it all? And what happens when courts and governments decide that a platform this large has to answer to them?

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• 2. Brothers Without a Base

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  Before Telegram, Nikolai and Pavel Durov had already built the Russian social network VK. They left it in 2014, saying the government had taken it over. Pavel sold his remaining stake and left Russia after resisting official pressure. The brothers divided the labor. Nikolai created MTProto, the protocol that underpins the messenger, while Pavel supplied money and infrastructure through his Digital Fortress fund.

  Where the company actually lives is deliberately blurry. Telegram is registered in the British Virgin Islands and as an LLC in Dubai. It will not say where it rents offices or through which legal entities. Its stated reason is the need to "shelter the team from unnecessary influence" and to protect users from government data requests. The company says it denies that profit is its end goal, yet it is not set up as a nonprofit.

  After leaving Russia, Pavel was said to be moving from country to country with a small crew of 15 core programmers. A former VK employee claimed Telegram had staff in Saint Petersburg. Pavel told a different story. In his account, the team made Berlin its headquarters in 2014, could not get German residence permits for everyone, and scattered to other jurisdictions in early 2015. Since 2017, the company has been based in Dubai.

  Its data centers sit inside a tangle of shell companies in various jurisdictions. The company says this protects "the data that is not covered by end-to-end encryption". Telegram's help pages make a bold claim: "to this day, we have disclosed 0 bytes of user messages to third parties, including governments". Pavel later gave a more nuanced picture. He said the company handed over data in response to 203 legal requests from Brazil between January and September 2024. During the same months, it did so for 6,992 requests from India, its largest market. Users can ask a transparency bot how many requests from their own country the company has processed.

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• 3. The Climb to a Billion

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  In October 2013, two months after launch, Telegram announced it had 100,000 daily active users. By the 24th of March 2014, the figure was 35 million monthly users, 15 million of them daily. Politics gave the app a push that October. South Korean government surveillance plans drove many citizens away from the Korean app KakaoTalk and toward Telegram.

  By December 2014, the company reported 50 million active users and 1 billion daily messages. One million people were signing up every week, and message traffic had doubled in five months, reaching 2 billion a day. In September 2015, the count was 60 million active users sending 12 billion messages daily. In February 2016, Telegram reported 100 million monthly active users, 350,000 new sign-ups a day and 15 billion daily messages.

  Then came 180 million in December 2017, and by March 2018 the number had doubled to 200 million. Outages at rival companies later proved to be an unlikely growth engine. On the 14th of March 2019, Pavel said 3 million people had signed up within 24 hours. He gave no reason, but the timing matched a long outage across Facebook and its family of apps, including Instagram. According to the US Securities and Exchange Commission, Telegram had 300 million monthly active users by October 2019, and it announced 400 million on the 24th of April 2020.

  On the 8th of January 2021, a blog post from Pavel claimed "about 500 million" monthly users. That month, Telegram was the most downloaded app in the world. By late August 2021, it had reached 1 billion downloads. TechCrunch reported that India was the largest market, with 22% of installs. Another Facebook outage, on the 5th of October 2021, brought more than 70 million new users in its wake.

  The pace held. The count reached 700 million on the 19th of June 2022 and passed 800 million in July 2023. It hit 900 million in March 2024 and 950 million by July 2024. Every one of those people had to register with a phone number, a rule that shapes much of how the app behaves.

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• 4. Chats, Channels and Bots

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  A Telegram account is tied to a phone number or a custom username rather than to any single device. The alternative is an anonymous +888 number bought from the Fragment blockchain platform. Sign-ups are possible only on Android or iOS. Phone numbers are hidden by default, visible only to a user's contacts. Messages sync automatically across every logged-in device through cloud storage. Because of that, someone can start typing on a phone, and the unfinished "cloud draft" waits on a laptop. Accounts that stay inactive for 6 months are deleted by default, though the setting can stretch to 18 months.

  Messages can carry files up to 2 GB, or 4 GB for Premium subscribers. In private chats they can be edited for 48 hours, and a message can be deleted for both sides without a trace. Users can even import chat history from WhatsApp, Line and KakaoTalk. For extra caution, a one-on-one Secret Chat lives only on the device where it began and self-destructs on logout. Its encryption keys change after 100 uses or after a week. Messages in any chat can also vanish after a timer the user sets, from one day to one year.

  Groups are where the scale becomes striking. A group can hold up to 200,000 members, and administrators can split it into topics that work like subgroups. Channels go further. They are one-way feeds for an unlimited audience, in which followers can read, react and, if allowed, comment. Only the admins can see who subscribes. In December 2019, Bloomberg News moved its messenger-based newsletter from WhatsApp after that service banned bulk and automated messaging. The Financial Times, Business Insider and The New York Times also run official channels. Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Emmanuel Macron use channels, and journalists under oppressive regimes have used them to build independent news networks.

  In June 2015, Telegram opened a platform for third-party bots, which are accounts run by programs. Bots took on payments, games and customer service for businesses. In February 2018 came Telegram Login, a way to sign into outside websites without revealing a phone number. In July 2018, the company introduced Telegram Passport, an identity system that drew criticism for being vulnerable to online brute-force attacks. By July 2024, Telegram Mini Apps had reached 500 million monthly active users.

  In 2026, the company began adding generative AI features. They run open-source models inside a confidential compute network called Cocoon, and in January 2026 came AI summaries of long channel posts.

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• 5. Cryptography Under Scrutiny

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  Cryptography experts have long raised an objection to Telegram's default settings. Unless a user opts in, the service keeps all contacts, messages and media on its servers along with their decryption keys, and end-to-end encryption is not on by default. Pavel Durov has defended this design. In his view, it avoids unsecured third-party backups and lets people reach their files from any device. The desktop clients, apart from the macOS one, have no end-to-end option at all. Telegram argues that online backups without client-side encryption are "the most secure solution currently possible".

  Critics also disliked that Telegram built its own scheme. MTProto, designed by Nikolai Durov and other Telegram developers, protects Secret Chats. Version 2.0 rests on 256-bit AES symmetric encryption, 2048-bit RSA and Diffie-Hellman key exchange. It replaced version 1.0 in December 2017, and clients from v4.6 onward carried the change.

  In December 2020, a team from the University of Udine in Italy published a study of the newer version. They had noticed that detailed checks existed only for version 1.0, where most criticism had landed. Using a verifier called ProVerif, they produced a fully automated proof that MTProto 2.0 holds up for authentication, normal chat, end-to-end encrypted chat and re-keying. The properties covered integrity, confidentiality and perfect forward secrecy.

  The same team added some warnings. Because everything passes through Telegram's servers, and because the server picks the Diffie-Hellman parameters, they said the "server should not be considered as trusted". A man-in-the-middle attack becomes possible if users never compare the fingerprints of their shared keys. They also noted that a symbolic model cannot make the final proof. That would take a computational model, using tools such as CryptoVerif or EasyCrypt.

  Telegram also ran two contests inviting outsiders to break its cryptography, with rewards of US$200000 and then US$300000. Both expired with no winner. Moxie Marlinspike, founder of the rival Signal messenger, called the first contest rigged in Telegram's favor. He said it could not be won even with completely broken algorithms, such as MD2 used as a key stream extractor or the Dual EC DRBG generator known to be backdoored.

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• 6. The Gram Gamble and Ad Money

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  Telegram's first financier was its founder, who spent his own money from the VK sale. In 2017, he looked for a way to earn without selling advertisements. His answer was a blockchain platform called The Open Network, or TON, with a cryptocurrency named Gram. The project was announced in mid-December 2017. Nikolai Durov wrote the codebase, and a 132-page technical paper appeared in January 2018.

  The ambition was vast. Pavel wanted to power TON with the existing Telegram audience and make it a platform for apps and services, like a decentralized WeChat, Google Play and App Store. Supporters also pictured a decentralized rival to Visa and MasterCard, able to handle millions of transactions per second. In January and February 2018, Telegram privately sold futures contracts for Grams and raised around $1.7 billion, with investors including Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Capital and Benchmark. No public offering took place.

  Work ran in isolation, and the launch slipped repeatedly. A test network went live in January 2019, and the main network was scheduled for the 31st of October. On the 30th of October, the US Securities and Exchange Commission won a temporary restraining order to stop Grams reaching their first buyers. The regulator called the scheme an unregistered securities offering, with those buyers acting as underwriters.

  Judge P. Kevin Castel agreed and kept the limits in force. They applied even to buyers outside the United States, since Telegram could not stop resale to US citizens on a secondary market, and anonymity was central to TON. Durov announced the end of Telegram's active involvement. On the 26th of June, the judge approved a settlement. Telegram paid an $18.5 million penalty and returned $1.22 billion to Gram purchasers.

  That left debts to settle. On the 15th of March 2021, the company placed five-year bonds worth $1 billion. The debts totaled $625.7 million, including $433 million owed to buyers of Gram futures in 2018, such as David Yakobashvili. On the 23rd of March, a further $150 million of bonds went to Abu Dhabi's Mubadala Investment Company and Abu Dhabi Catalyst Partners. A day later, Mubadala said Russia's sovereign wealth fund had joined its deal undisclosed. A Telegram spokesperson replied that "RDIF is not in the list of investors we sold bonds to". Holders can convert the bonds to shares at a 10% discount if the company holds an open IPO. Press reports said Durov had earlier refused an offer for a 5-10% stake, valuing the company between $30 billion and $40 billion. In March 2024, Telegram sold $330 million more, and in March 2026 Durov said the 2021 bonds were fully repaid.

  The everyday revenue came later. Telegram has promised never to show ads in private chats. In October 2021, its Sponsored Messages began appearing in channels with more than 1000 followers. Telegram Premium launched on the 19th of June 2022, and Telegram Stars arrived in June 2024 for buying digital goods. In October 2024, Gifts followed, and Collectible Gifts, registered on the TON blockchain, came in January 2025. A Snoop Dogg release followed in July 2025, and in November 2025 collectible gifts moved to auctions, with Khabib Nurmagomedov and the UFC. In December 2024, Durov announced that Telegram was profitable.

  The ad model has caused trouble. In August 2025, Germany's public broadcaster NDR closed its tagesschau channel after learning that ads, some described as "shady" betting offers, were earning it unsolicited Toncoin.

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• 7. The Moderation Problem

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  In September 2015, Pavel Durov was asked about the Islamic State using Telegram. He replied: "I think that privacy, ultimately, and our right for privacy is more important than our fear of bad things happening, like terrorism." The remark captures a platform that bans only calls to violence, illegal pornography and scams. Because it mixes private messaging with social media features, organizations have used it for recruitment and propaganda, and protesters in Belarus, Russia, Hong Kong and Iran have used it to organize.

  Telegram did take action against ISIS. From December 2016, it published daily moderation statistics in a channel named @ISISwatch, and later it worked with Europol. The group reportedly retreated to the dark web, and US officials called the purge particularly effective. In 2023, Saudi Arabia's Etidal center reported that, in collaboration with Telegram, over 59 million pieces of extremist material had been removed since 2022. Yet communities of far-right extremists remain. Videos of the Christchurch and Halle shootings spread there after Twitch took down the livestreams. Durov has argued that "conspiracy theories only strengthen each time their content is removed by moderators".

  After the 2021 coup in Myanmar, the junta used channels to spread propaganda and run misinformation campaigns. In response to a call from the UN human rights office, Telegram reportedly banned 13 accounts tied to the military. Oxford University research suggests that many extremist groups stay small because Telegram's search does not use sorting algorithms.

  The worst failures involve abuse of people. In January 2021, a now-banned group called "Public Room" had more than 7,000 members in North Macedonia, who traded nude photos of women and young teenage girls. Anonymous accounts added phone numbers and social profiles. President Stevo Pendarovski and Prime Minister Zoran Zaev threatened to restrict the app in the country. In August 2024, a BBC investigation found Telegram had not answered requests to join the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children or the Internet Watch Foundation. Telegram said its moderation is "within industry standards and constantly improving". The company runs a verified channel, "Stop Child Abuse", that posts daily ban statistics.

  Bots add further risks. On the 11th of May 2020, Volodymyr Flents announced that a bot was selling personal data of Ukrainian citizens, with an estimated 26 million entries tied to the Diia app. Minister Mykhailo Fedorov denied any leak from the app, but 25 people were confirmed as criminally involved and copies of 30 databases were seized. Telegram reportedly banned more than 350,000 bots and channels in 2020.

  Fraud is the other constant. In July 2023, Hyderabad Police uncovered a scheme that duped 15,000 Indian citizens in under a year through fake "prepaid tasks". The money trail led to China. In September 2023, Singapore police said more than 6,600 residents had lost money to similar job scams on Telegram and WhatsApp. In 2025, Telegram blocked Huione Guarantee, a marketplace across thousands of channels that Elliptic said scammers in Cambodian scam centers relied upon.

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• 8. Governments and Courts

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  On the 26th of April 2023, Brazil suspended Telegram and fined it daily for not fully answering a Federal Police investigation into neo-Nazi activity. The company had only partly met a court request for data on two antisemitic groups, after a series of violent school attacks. Its CEO said the requested data was technologically impossible to obtain. A federal court lifted the suspension three days later but kept the fine. Twelve days after that, Telegram told its users that Brazil's Bill No. 2630 on disinformation would end freedom of speech.

  Brazil was far from alone. Iran, China and Pakistan have blocked Telegram at times, and Russia kept a ban in place for several years before lifting it in 2020. On the 19th of April 2024, Apple removed the app from its App Store in China. In March 2024, a Spanish judge ordered a temporary block after Mediaset, Atresmedia and Movistar Plus+ complained about copyrighted material. Days later he suspended the order, and finally he annulled it as "disproportionate".

  Courts have also forced disclosure. On the 24th of November 2022, Telegram gave up admin names, phone numbers and IP addresses of channels accused of sharing national exam study materials. It did so after the Delhi High Court rejected the argument that its servers were in Singapore. In September 2024, the company announced it would give IP addresses and phone numbers to authorities with search warrants or other valid legal requests.

  Politics and censorship have shadowed the app too. In 2019, hundreds of pages of a leaked group chat between Puerto Rico's Governor Ricardo Rosselló and his staff, judged vulgar, racist and homophobic, helped end his term. In September 2021, ahead of Russian regional elections, Telegram suspended bots tied to Alexei Navalny's allies, including the Smart Voting bot. Durov blamed pressure from Apple and Google and posted a screenshot of an App Store email demanding the takedown of Navalny-related material. Navalny's spokeswoman, Kira Yarmysh, called it "censorship" imposed by private companies.

  In September 2024, Ukraine banned Telegram on official devices used by government officials, military personnel and key workers. It cited fears of Russian espionage but left personal phones alone. In February 2026, Russia restricted the app, saying it failed to protect personal data and curb criminal activity. Durov accused Moscow of steering users toward a state-backed platform, presumably Max. In August 2024, the EU opened a probe because Telegram had not updated its user numbers under the Digital Services Act. In February 2024, it had claimed 41 million users in the EU, then said "significantly fewer than 45mn".

  The sharpest confrontation came on the 24th of August 2024. French authorities arrested Pavel Durov, a citizen of both France and the UAE. On the 28th of August, he was charged with a wide array of crimes. They included complicity in managing an online platform that enabled illegal transactions, complicity in distributing child sexual abuse material, drug trafficking, fraud and refusing to cooperate with law enforcement. He posted bail of five million euros, could not leave France and had to report to a police station twice a week. A special magistrate with both investigative and prosecutorial powers took charge of the case.

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