Years ago, we built TON – a scalable and fast blockchain technology. TON was designed to serve hundreds of millions of social media users. Since 2020, the TON technology has been maintained and improved by the open source community.

Last year, we enabled our users to buy and sell Telegram usernames and IDs on Fragment – a TON-based auction platform. It was a phenomenal success. Telegram sold $120M worth of digital assets in auctions, while early buyers of some Telegram-related digital assets – such as Telegram anonymous numbers – have seen a 27x (!) increase in value after only 9 months.

This success showed the potential of Web 3.0 on Telegram. For the first time in history, users were allowed to own their social media identities directly. Now we want to integrate blockchain technologies deeper into Telegram. To do that, we worked with the folks from the TON community to add their TON Wallet to Telegram as a mini-app.

Starting this November, TON Wallet will be included in the settings and attachment menus for all our users outside the US and some other countries (if you added @wallet and have the latest version of Telegram, you can already see the wallet option in the menus). This step will allow developers to enable hundreds of new valuable features – similar to those pioneered on Fragment. TON Wallet, a third-party mini-app inside Telegram, will introduce a whole new dimension of Web 3.0 to hundreds of millions of Telegram users.

Hundreds of thousands are signing up for Telegram from Israel and the Palestinian Territories.

In addition to Arabic, we’ve just added support for Hebrew in the Telegram UI. Everyone affected should have reliable access to news and private communication in these dire times.

Every day, Telegram's moderators and AI tools remove millions of obviously harmful content from our public platform. However, tackling war-related coverage is seldom obvious.

Earlier this week, Hamas used Telegram to warn civilians in Ashkelon to leave the area ahead of their missile strikes. Would shutting down their channel help save lives — or would it endanger more lives?

It’s always tempting to act on emotional impulses. But such complex situations require thorough consideration that should also take into account the differences between social platforms.

Unlike other apps that algorithmically promote shocking content to unsuspecting people, on Telegram, users receive only the content to which they specifically subscribed. As such, it's unlikely that Telegram channels can be used to significantly amplify propaganda. Instead, they serve as a unique source of first-hand information for researchers, journalists, and fact-checkers.

While it would be easy for us to destroy this source of information, doing so risks exacerbating an already dire situation.