🔐 We’ve upgraded Telegram’s anti-censorship protocol. Users in Russia are advised to update their apps to stay connected despite the ban.

⚠️ Some other advice: stock up on several VPNs/proxies in advance, help your friends and family do the same, and avoid using Russian apps while connected to a VPN (they may report your VPN to authorities for blocking).

💪 I’m glad to see most people are already doing this. Thanks to this Digital Resistance, Telegram usage in Russia has remained stable over the past week despite the full ban.

🔥 Keep it up. On our side, we’ll continue improving Telegram’s decentralized anti-censorship tech.

⚠️ WhatsApp’s “End-to-end encryption by default” claim is a giant consumer fraud.

📖 ~95% of private messages on WhatsApp end up in plain-text backups on Apple/Google servers — not E2E-encrypted. Backup encryption is optional, and few people enable it — let alone use strong passwords.

🔑Even if you encrypt your WhatsApp backups with a strong password, your messages still end up in unencrypted cloud backups — because 90%+ of the people you message haven’t done the same. Add the fact that WhatsApp stores and discloses who you chat with, and the picture is dire.

📤 Apple and Google disclose backed-up WhatsApp messages to third parties thousands of times per year. Meanwhile, Telegram hasn’t disclosed a single byte of users’ messages in its entire 12+ year history 💬

🗽 Anyone under 25 can win €100,000 for an essay on digital freedoms. The Youth Liberty Prize 2026 supports young thinkers ready to defend freedom from threats like censorship, surveillance, digital IDs and CBDCs.

Stand for freedom and win ✊

Full details: https://www.libertyprize.org/

Group admins can assign tags to users — or embrace the chaos and let them assign their own. 🔥

⚡️ You can now create agentic bots in just 2 taps 🤖

Ask the devs of the services you use to support it 👇

https://core.telegram.org/bots/features#managed-bots

🇪🇺 The EU wants to force mandatory ID checks on anyone using social media — and ban people under 18 from accessing it. To that end, the EU Commission spent over a year building an “age verification app”, which its president pompously unveiled yesterday.

Today, this app got hacked in just 2 minutes.

But don’t rush to laugh at EU bureaucrats.

Their age verification app was hackable by design — it trusted the device (that’s instant game over). Unless the EU is run by clowns 🤡, this is their real plan:

Step 1 — Present a “privacy-respecting” but hackable app.
Step 2 — Get hacked (*YOU ARE HERE*).
Step 3 — Remove privacy to “fix” the app.

Result — a surveillance tool sold as “privacy-respecting”.

The EU bureaucrats needed an excuse to silently start turning their “privacy-respecting” age verification app into a surveillance mechanism over all Europeans using social media. Today’s “surprising hack” just handed this excuse to them.

🦇 Stay vigilant!

🎁 Our new Login Widget is a gift to developers: they can not only quickly authorize users, but also request users’ phone numbers and permission to message them on Telegram.

🆓 Sign-up, login, phone verification, and a follow-up communication channel in one — completely free.

✅ The Telegram Login SDK now supports native iOS and Android apps.📱

🤩 Only Telegram lets developers verify users’ phone numbers for free — something that’s otherwise expensive. 🫰

🍴 Expect more apps adding “Continue with Telegram"! 🚀

🇫🇷 Macron’s France is losing legitimacy as it weaponizes criminal investigations to suppress free speech and privacy. The U.S. Department of Justice has refused to assist France in its investigation of Elon Musk, calling the case politically motivated.

🎭 The French prosecutor’s office claims to be independent, but that is untrue: French prosecutors are hired, fired, and promoted by the government. The judicial police — who provide often misleading reports to investigative judges — are also controlled by the government.

I’m under a similar investigation in France: over a dozen charges, each carrying up to 10 years in prison. Proud to stand alongside Elon Musk and others targeted by Macron's campaign against digital rights. In Macron’s France, being investigated is the new Légion d’honneur.🎖

This is how the EU/UK now regulates social media:

🤐 Offer CEOs secret deals to censor dissent.
🚨 If they refuse, open criminal cases against them.
😑 When people push back, say it's "all for the children".

"Protecting children" has become the standard legal/PR cover. 🎭

The apartment in Russia where I lived 20 years ago received a summons for “Suspect P. V. Durov”.

They must be suspecting me of defending Articles 29 and 23 of the Russian Constitution — which guarantee freedom of speech and the right to private correspondence.

Proud to be guilty! 😏

⚡️ In one week, TON fees will drop 6× — to just 0.00039 TON (~$0.0005) per transaction, fixed regardless of network load.

🆓 Soon after most transactions go fully feeless. Zero commission.

🪙 MTONGA

41 kidnappings of crypto holders in France in 3.5 months of 2026.

Why?

🥖 French tax officials selling crypto owners' data to criminals (Ghalia C.) + massive tax database leaks.

Now the same state also wants IDs and private messages of social media users.

More data => More leaks => More victims.

That’s why Telegram would rather leave the French market than give their corrupt bureaucrats access to private messages. 🐶

⚡️ Fees in TON have dropped 6× — to nearly zero.

Next step — Telegram replaces the TON Foundation as the driving force behind TON and becomes its largest validator.

⚙️ The focus shifts to tech superiority.

🧩 New ton.org, new dev tools, new performance upgrades.

🧭 Timeline — 2-3 weeks.

🪙 This is step 3 of 7 to Make TON Great Again.

💎 Telegram becoming TON’s largest validator strengthens decentralization.

✅ It lets other major players join the validator pool without centralizing the network — with Telegram as the counterbalance.

📈 More and more TON gets locked in validation as everyone competes for 20%+ APR.

🏁 TON leads Layer-1 blockchains in finality time.

🔗 Sources: https://telegra.ph/Comparison-of-Layer-1-blockchains-by-finalization-time-05-01

🫴 TON is #1 in annual staking rewards among the 50 largest cryptocurrencies.

And that’s on top of the coin’s price growth — which doubled over the past week.

🏆 We’ve distributed $75,000 among the best designers who imagined a new way to communicate — Telegram Nodes (see here).

⚖ I joined the judging process and spent 10+ hours reviewing thousands of designs from nearly 200 participants. Great work! 👏

🔜 We’ve now invited the 19 winners to suggest improvements to existing Telegram features.

⭐️ We’re looking for people who — like us — have a burning desire to make Telegram better every day, with no exceptions.