? Big day! Today we introduce the Telegram Browser and Mini App Store, plus many other innovations ✨?

? The Browser lets users switch between viewing websites and messaging, merging communication with news consumption. It is equipped with all the features you would expect from a browser — like search, bookmarks, and multiple tabs ?

? Most importantly, Telegram Browser allows people to view decentralized websites called TON Sites. This opens the world of blockchain-based web (often called Web 3.0) to almost a billion users. To try it out, update Telegram and open a link (like tonsite://getting-started.ton) ?

⭐️ Users can now gift Stars to their friends, who will be directed to the Mini App Store for examples of apps that accept Stars. To check out the mini app catalog, go to the 'Apps' tab in Search ?

? Speaking of mini apps, they have a whole new way to spread virally across the Telegram ecosystem — via Stories, which also got an upgrade today with covers and smart animated weather widgets ☀️

? We’re proud to ship this. Try it all yourself or check out the video demos on the blog. Enjoy your summer holidays — we’ll keep building ?‍?

? I was just told that I have over 100 biological kids. How is this possible for a guy who has never been married and prefers to live alone? ?

? Fifteen years ago, a friend of mine approached me with a weird request. He said that he and his wife couldn’t have kids due to a fertility issue and asked me to donate sperm at a clinic for them to have a baby. I laughed my ass off before realizing he was dead serious ?

?‍⚕️ The boss of the clinic told me that “high quality donor material” was in short supply and that it was my civic duty to donate more sperm to anonymously help more couples. This sounded crazy enough to get me to sign up for sperm donation ?

?Fast forward to 2024, my past donating activity has helped over a hundred couples in 12 countries to have kids. Moreover, many years after I stopped being a donor, at least one IVF clinic still has my frozen sperm available for anonymous use by families who want to have kids ?

? Now I plan to open-source my DNA so that my biological children can find each other more easily. Of course, there are risks, but I don’t regret having been a donor. The shortage of healthy sperm has become an increasingly serious issue worldwide, and I’m proud that I did my part to help alleviate it ?

? I also want to help destigmatize the whole notion of sperm donation and incentivize more healthy men to do it, so that families struggling to have kids can enjoy more options. Defy convention — redefine the norm! ✊

? Despite the fact that I am clearly a dog person, Telegram hosts the largest cat-lover community in the world — Catizen ?

? Catizen is a mini game on Telegram with over 26 million players. The game has already earned $16 million (!) from in-app purchases and donated 1% of it to rescue stray cats ?

? Catizen introduced millions of people to blockchain, because it uses TON-based smart contracts for its in-game rewards. Their team also built tools for other developers to easily launch their games on Telegram and TON ?

? Well done, Catizen team — now I’m waiting for you to develop a “Dogizen”! ?

? Notcoin, a miniapp on Telegram, reached 35M active users in just a few months. ? In this app, users could earn a game currency “notcoins” by clicking on the screen. Yesterday, the cryptocurrency Notcoin was minted on the TON blockchain and listed on all…

? Notcoin, a miniapp on Telegram, reached 35M active users in just a few months.

? In this app, users could earn a game currency “notcoins” by clicking on the screen. Yesterday, the cryptocurrency Notcoin was minted on the TON blockchain and listed on all major cryptoexchanges. All of a sudden, Notcoin users who just played this game for fun could convert their in-game currency into real money ?

? Notcoin instantly became a top-10 cryptocurrency in the world by trading volume, and reached almost $700 million in market capitalization. Imagine — hundreds of millions of dollars in value were created for Telegram users in this miniapp out of nowhere in a matter of months ?

? This amazing success story shows how powerful the Telegram / TON ecosystems are for app developers. Telegram offers app developers more freedom than any other platform, providing unmatched opportunities to leverage social interactions for viral distribution. TON, in turn, provides scale and flexibility for any blockchain project on top of it ?

We are now seeing a large wave of new miniapps being built on Telegram and TON. Notcoin, the leader of the pack, used its mighty paws to pave the way for many apps to come ?

? A story shared by Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter, uncovered that the current leaders of Signal, an allegedly “secure” messaging app, are activists used by the US state department for regime change abroad ?

? The US government spent $3M to build Signal’s encryption, and today the exact same encryption is implemented in WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Google Messages and even Skype. It looks almost as if big tech in the US is not allowed to build its own encryption protocols that would be independent of government interference ?‍?

?️‍♂️ An alarming number of important people I’ve spoken to remarked that their “private” Signal messages had been exploited against them in US courts or media. But whenever somebody raises doubt about their encryption, Signal’s typical response is “we are open source so anyone can verify that everything is all right”. That, however, is a trick ?

?️‍♂️ Unlike Telegram, Signal doesn’t allow researchers to make sure that their GitHub code is the same code that is used in the Signal app run on users’ iPhones. Signal refused to add reproducible builds for iOS, closing a GitHub request from the community. And WhatsApp doesn’t even publish the code of its apps, so all their talk about “privacy” is an even more obvious circus trick ?

? Telegram is the only massively popular messaging service that allows everyone to make sure that all of its apps indeed use the same open source code that is published on Github. For the past ten years, Telegram Secret Chats have remained the only popular method of communication that is verifiably private ?

? Last week, we issued $330M worth of bonds to ensure Telegram can keep expanding at an accelerated speed.

This bond offering was oversubscribed, and we were delighted to have global funds of the highest caliber with impeccable reputations as participants. The terms of the bonds (when adjusted for the Federal Reserve rate) were the most favorable for Telegram in the history of our company.

I am proud that every time we issue bonds we get better at this process. The increased demand for our bonds shows that global financial institutions value Telegram’s growth in audience and monetization. This will further solidify our position as an independent platform that is able to challenge the “Goliaths” of our industry.

All large social media apps are easy targets for criticism due to the content they host. I can’t recall any major social platform whose moderation has been consistently praised by traditional media.

The media coverage of Meta's moderation efforts has been particularly negative for most of its history. Interestingly enough, Meta was also the first social media company to have reached a trillion-dollar-plus valuation.

Telegram will likely have to go through similar growth stages before it surpasses legacy platforms. As we rapidly rise in scale and significance, we shall solve any potential challenges the same way we do everything else — with efficiency, innovation and respect for privacy and freedom of speech.

?‍? This week we launched the first batch of Telegram Business features. Users can now convert their personal Telegram accounts into business accounts. As a result, they will be able to add their location and opening hours, organize chats with color labels, use automatic greeting/away messages and shortcuts for quick replies.

That’s just the start — we are shipping more Telegram Business features this month. One of these features will revolutionize how people interact with chatbots. Telegram Business accounts will be able to seamlessly add chatbots as their invisible secretaries to respond to all or certain chats. With AI, these chatbots can bring customer service automation to an entirely new level.

The new Bot APIs for developers will become available later this month, all for free. Stay tuned — more exciting stuff is coming for businesses and developers on Telegram this season.

Millions of people have been signing up and sharing content on Telegram in the last hour while Instagram and Facebook were down. Interestingly, Telegram is more reliable than these services — despite spending several times less on infrastructure per user.

We also have about 1000 times (!) fewer full-time employees than Meta, but manage to launch new features and innovate faster.

Throughout 2023, Telegram was unavailable for a total of only 9 minutes out of the year’s 525,600 minutes. That’s a 99.9983% uptime ?