Telegram

Pavel Durov and his brother Nikolai founded VKontakte in 2006 — a social network that became the largest in Russia and the CIS, with hundreds of millions of users. As VKontakte grew, Russian government pressure on Durov intensified: demands to hand over user data on Ukrainian Euromaidan protesters, to take down communities of Russian opposition supporters, and ultimately to sell his controlling stake. In April 2014, Durov was forced out as CEO. He sold his 12% stake to Mail.ru Group (controlled by a Kremlin-connected oligarch) for approximately $300 million and left Russia with his brother, his money, and his conviction that communications infrastructure should be independent of governments.

Pavel and Nikolai Durov had begun building Telegram in 2013, while still managing VKontakte — driven by the same surveillance concerns that would later force their departure. Nikolai designed the MTProto encryption protocol specifically for Telegram: a custom protocol designed for speed and security simultaneously, capable of handling encrypted messaging at scale across unreliable mobile connections. The emphasis on speed — Telegram messages were notably faster to send and receive than WhatsApp messages — became a defining differentiator. Telegram launched publicly in August 2013 and reached 100,000 daily active users within the first day.

Durov's founding philosophy for Telegram was explicit and unconventional: the platform would never show advertising, would never sell user data, and would accept no venture capital from investors who might one day demand compromises. He funded Telegram personally from his VKontakte proceeds. In 2018, Telegram attempted to build TON (Telegram Open Network) — a blockchain platform with its own cryptocurrency (Gram) — raising $1.7 billion from private investors in the largest ICO in history. The SEC sued Telegram in 2019, alleging the Gram tokens were unregistered securities. Telegram settled for $18.5 million in penalties and returned the funds, abandoning the original TON plan. An independent team later built a separate chain using the open-source TON codebase.

Telegram reached 700 million monthly active users in 2022. The platform's distinctive feature — public channels with unlimited subscribers — made it the primary infrastructure for media organisations, politicians, protest movements, criminal networks, and news dissemination globally. Where WhatsApp was encrypted peer-to-peer messaging, Telegram was a public broadcasting platform and a private messaging app simultaneously. In 2021, Telegram introduced its first limited monetisation: optional premium subscriptions at $5/month and advertising in public channels with over 1,000 subscribers. Durov had maintained for years that Telegram would never need revenue; the introduction of monetisation acknowledged that 700 million users required more infrastructure than one man's VKontakte proceeds could sustain.

In August 2024, Pavel Durov was arrested at Le Bourget airport near Paris, charged by French authorities with being complicit in the facilitation of child sexual abuse material, drug trafficking, and fraud through Telegram's failure to moderate illegal content. He was held for four days, released on bail of €5 million, and barred from leaving France. The arrest triggered global debate about platform liability and encryption. Telegram subsequently began significantly expanding its content moderation, sharing user data with law enforcement in more jurisdictions, and publishing transparency reports. Durov stated the platform had crossed 1 billion monthly active users. The arrest of the founder of the world's largest messaging platform outside Meta's ecosystem was one of the most consequential moments in the history of online speech.