On August 25, French media reported that Telegram CEO Pavel Durov was arrested by French police after landing at Le Bourget Airport in northern Paris. In addition, French police also searched Durov's property.

The arrest stems from the French police's investigation into the lack of regulation of the Telegram platform. French authorities believe that Telegram lacks an effective regulatory mechanism, which has led to a large number of criminal activities on the platform, including the spread of false information and hate speech. Sources said that Durov was accused of drug trafficking, gun black market and child pornography on the Telegram platform, and Telegram had previously refused to cooperate with the police on this.

According to Russian state news agency TASS, the Russian Embassy in France is taking "immediate steps" to clarify the situation.

Telegram, which pursues absolute openness and freedom of the platform, has been subject to regulatory inquiries from local governments for many years. Durov revealed in an interview with former well-known American host Tucker Carlson not long ago that Telegram had received two regulatory emails from the Democratic and Republican parties in the US Senate, stating that failure to cooperate would violate the US Constitution, and Durov did not respond to these requests.

However, since this year, the regulatory pressure faced by Telegram has increased dramatically. At the beginning of the year, the European Union began to decide to regulate Telegram, and the regulatory body is the Belgian Institute for Postal Services and Telecommunications (BIPT). According to Belgian media De Standaard, the agency will investigate the spread of illegal content on the Telegram platform, including calls for violence, illegal sales of weapons and drugs, etc. If Telegram does not respond to user complaints, the regulator will have the right to fine it. In the report, Telegram was called "an online bait platform for extreme right-wingers, drug dealers and terrorists", and this happened only 4 months before Durov was arrested.

"Russia's Zuckerberg"

Durov has a well-known nickname, "Russia's Zuckerberg". In 2006, 21-year-old Durov and his brother Nikolai imitated the then popular social media platform Facebook, founded VK in Russia and quickly seized the domestic market. It took 4 years for the number of registered users to exceed 100 million.

However, since VK does not control the speech on the platform, many politically oriented contents are widely spread on the platform. The Russian opposition has widely used the application to organize large-scale protests in Russia. Subsequently, the platform received pressure from the Russian National Security Agency FBS, but Durov publicly posted the letter sent by FBS to VK on Twitter, as well as a playful photo of a husky to show his resistance. Durov declared, "Neither I nor my team will engage in political censorship. We will not block any community. Freedom of information is an inalienable right in post-industrial society, without which VK's existence is meaningless."

The conflict with Russian officials significantly increased the reputation of VK and Durov. Soon after, Durov was involved in a hit-and-run accident, and Russian police entered the VK office. In 2013, Pavel left Russia permanently and founded Telegram again with Nikolai. In an interview with The New York Times, Durov revealed that Telegram was inspired by a surprise visit to his apartment by the Russian SWAT team at the time, which made him realize that he had no safe way to communicate with his brother, and Telegram was born.

One day in 2012, Telegram founder Pavel Durov and employees of his former company VK threw airplanes made of banknotes to passers-by in front of the office window in the busiest area of St. Petersburg

Durov's experience at VK has profoundly influenced the style of Telegram, which has always presented an image of "user privacy first" to the outside world. The first principle of the Telegram platform is "freedom". It is a neutral social platform that does not favor any party. When Durov created Telegram, he said, "Every action in my life is for freedom. My life mission is to make other people free as much as possible. This is the mission of Telegram."

In a recent interview, Durov revealed that Telegram is a distributed company that is not subject to the jurisdiction and security agencies of any country. To achieve this goal, Telegram has dispersed its servers around the world to ensure that it is difficult for any government to force Telegram to give up any data.

Telegram has also developed a "secret chat" feature that uses end-to-end encryption. After choosing to turn it on, the Telegram server will not be able to see the content of the message. At the same time, in order to amplify the spread and influence of content on the platform, Telegram's public channels can have an unlimited number of subscribers, while private groups can have up to 200,000 people, and users can upload files up to 2GB.

The openness and privacy protection attributes presented by these designs have also become the main driving force for the growth of Telegram users in special periods. For example, many people choose to come to Telegram after being banned by Twitter or Facebook. Within 72 hours after the riots at the U.S. Capitol in 2021, Telegram added 25 million new users, becoming the most downloaded application in the Google Store for a time.

But anyone can speak out on public platforms, which also leads to the widespread spread of pornographic, violent and even criminal content. For example, the "Nth Room Incident" that shocked the Eastern and Western societies happened in a Telegram chat room. Terrorists also like Telegram. The ISIS members behind the 2015 Paris attacks used Telegram as their main propaganda channel.

In Telegram's official usage policy, it is clearly stated that spreading violent, obscene, criminal content or publishing false information is a violation. But Telegram does not seem to have the will or ability to solve these problems. It will only ban certain accounts when it is under strong government or public pressure. On the other hand, the platform currently has only about 50 core employees, compared to Facebook's 7,500 reviewers.

The Open Network: When Telegram Meets Blockchain

Today, Telegram is one of the fastest growing and most user-friendly social platforms in the world, and is still growing at a rate of 2.5 million new users per day, with 930 million active users. Compared with its competitor Signal, Telegram's monthly downloads are almost 10 times that of Signal, reaching more than 30 million downloads in just one month, and Durov is still the company's only product manager.

Many speculative institutions believe that Telegram stands out not only because of the platform's significant distribution capabilities, but also because it essentially embodies the spirit of cryptocurrency. For Telegram, which pursues "freedom" and "openness", blockchain with similar concepts is simply a match made in heaven. Shortly after Telegram was founded, the Durov brothers created a white paper for Telegram's own public blockchain, The Open Network (TON). This is a fast, secure and scalable blockchain project that aims to accommodate all current and planned applications. It can be considered the best business partner with Telegram. TON is a huge distributed "super server" that helps Telegram and other applications host and provide various services.

However, the project was soon terminated due to regulatory pressure from the United States. One early morning in 2020, Pavel Durov posted on Telegram's official channel that the blockchain project TON, which had been promoted for two and a half years, officially terminated its development, and stated that this decision was in response to the US court's ban on Telegram from distributing its Gram tokens anywhere. Subsequently, the development of TON "went underground."

At the end of 2021, Durov suddenly posted in his personal Telegram channel, "I am very encouraged to see the champions of the Telegram programming competition continue to develop the open source TON project and rebrand it as Toncoin...Toncoin is different from the original TON and is independent of Telegram. But I hope their team can achieve the same success." This sentence is regarded by the crypto community as one of the examples of Telegram's endorsement of the TON project. Subsequently, TON has been with Telegram in a form that is not official but better than official.

In 2022, Telegram launched a domain name system based on the Ton Network and plans to auction Telegram usernames in the form of NFTs and settle them in TON tokens. In October of the same year, Pavel personally took action and built a decentralized auction platform Fragment based on TON with four other people, which supports TON token payments.

The mysterious TON Foundation followed, which is responsible for all other work other than development, such as finance and marketing. It is one of the few entities exposed to the outside world by TON, and its organizational structure is rarely known to the outside world. According to LinkedIn data, many members of the TON Foundation are located in Dubai. Among the founding members of the TON Foundation, people also found Andrew Rogozov, the former CEO of VK.

Since the second half of last year, Durov has begun to participate in the development of the TON ecosystem in a more high-profile manner. In a statement in July, Durov stated that he personally holds Bitcoin and Toncoin. Two months later, during Token 2049, Durov attended a keynote speech and discussed the values and future of TON.

With the joint efforts of Telegram and TON, the content ecology of this "International WeChat" has gradually prospered. At the end of 2023, various types of crypto trading robots developed based on Telegram applets became popular. They directly interacted with blockchain networks such as Ethereum through instructions and performed transactions and other operations. During the hot period, the daily transaction volume accounted for 2% of the entire on-chain market.

In fact, Telegram has never stopped trying to transform from a communication protocol to a broader social platform in recent years. With the launch of Telegram's paid Premium subscription service in June 2022, Telegram's product update and iteration frequency quickly entered the fast lane. Investors who are optimistic about Telegram's ecology have said, "Products with 800 million monthly active users do not need portraits. It has everything you want."

Since 2022, the speed of Telegram product updates has increased significantly, and it is mainly oriented towards social aspects

Thanks to the open source nature of the Telegram client, various rich SDKs and the perfect Bot API provided by the official for developers, countless developers can create various service robots by themselves and freely compete with official applications. Users can easily find various service functions such as music, movies, books and games on Telegram.

Durov recently announced in his channel that they will create an application store within Telegram and promote TON's Web3 applications, from games, wallets to practical tools. The extremely popular blockchain games Catizen and Notcoin in the past two months are all out-of-circle products in this ecosystem.

TON price plummeted after arrest, and bigwigs from all walks of life expressed support

After the news of Durov’s arrest this morning, the TON Foundation officially issued a statement to assure everyone that the TON community is still strong and fully operational. "As a community committed to free speech and decentralization, we firmly support Pavel in this challenging time. Pavel has always been a loyal advocate of these values, and we believe that his efforts to promote an open and decentralized Internet will continue to inspire millions of people. The TON community remains focused on our mission, and we will continue to work hard to uphold these principles around the world. We encourage everyone to stay calm, unite, and continue to build as we work together to deal with this situation. Thank you for your continued support."

But the news of the arrest of the soul figure is still a huge blow to the TON ecosystem. So far, affected by the news, the price of TON tokens has fallen by more than 15% in a short period of time, temporarily reporting $5.86. According to DefiLlama data, the TVL (total locked asset value) of the TON chain has also fallen sharply, with a single-day drop of more than 60%, currently at $310 million.

On the other hand, Durov has also won support from all walks of life. According to CCTV News, Russian State Duma Deputy Chairman Davankov called on the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs to try to rescue Pavel Durov in the early morning of the 25th. He said that he had sent a corresponding request to Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov. The Russian Foreign Ministry said that the Russian Embassy in France has taken the necessary measures to understand the relevant situation of Pavel Durov.

According to the Russian Satellite News Agency, former CIA analyst Larry Johnson said: "Telegram is one of the few channels that really allows information criticizing Western policies to continue to spread. I think this is really the root of the problem." The analyst called the charges against Durov a "fabricated political case," suggesting that the charges were intended to intimidate the tech entrepreneur. "There was a time when he was considered to be friendly with [French President Emmanuel] Macron," Johnson added. "But it's obviously over, because this arrest would not have happened without Macron's knowledge and approval."

Tesla CEO Musk commented on social media that "Telegram CEO Pavel Durov was arrested by French police" and said "This is propaganda for the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution." He also sarcastically said, "It's Europe in 2030, and you're being executed for liking a meme."

As the founder of one of the world's largest social platforms, Durov's experience has received great attention from industries and communities around the world. What does his arrest mean for Telegram and the TON public chain? At present, the relevant cases are still developing, and BlockBeats will continue to pay attention and follow up.

欢迎加入律动 BlockBeats 官方社群：

Telegram 订阅群：https://t.me/theblockbeats

Telegram 交流群：https://t.me/BlockBeats_App

Twitter 官方账号：https://twitter.com/BlockBeatsAsia