Messages can contain formatted text, media, files up to 2 GB (4 GB with Premium), locations, and audio or video messages recorded in-app. To use Telegram, a user must sign up with their phone number or an anonymous +888 number purchased from the Fragment blockchain platform. In February 2016, Telegram announced that it had 100 million monthly active users, with 350,000 new users signing up every day, delivering 15 billion messages daily.
- Durov planned to power TON with the existing Telegram user base, and turn it into the largest blockchain and a platform for apps and services akin to a decentralized WeChat, Google Play, and App Store.
- Channel owners are able to use Telegram to create giveaways, randomly awarding channel members with prizes such as Telegram Premium subscriptions to their followers, based on certain criteria.
- Ownership of channels and groups can be transferred to one of the admins if the owner wishes to give up their rights.
- It does not disclose where it rents offices or which legal entities it uses to rent them, citing the need to “shelter the team from unnecessary influence” and protect users from governmental data requests.
- As users can be logged into many devices at once, starting to type a message on one of them will create a “cloud draft” that syncs with others, so that typing can be started on a phone and finished on a laptop, for example.
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TON Telegram Open Network
In March 2021, Telegram launched a bonds offering to cover the debt and fund further growth of the app. The company agreed to pay an $18.5 million penalty and return $1.22 billion to Gram purchasers. In January and February 2018, the company ran a private sale of futures contracts for Grams, raising around $1.7 billion. In June 2024, Telegram launched Telegram Stars to facilitate in-app purchases of digital goods and services, in compliance with policies from the App Store and Play Store. Durov said the bond sale “will further solidify our position as an independent platform that is able to challenge the ‘Goliaths’ of our industry”. According to press reports, prior to the bonds placement, Durov had rejected an investment offer for a 5–10% stake in the company as well as several undisclosed ones, valuing the company in a $30–40 billion range.
What Are the Key Features of Telegram?
Telegram’s optional secret chat function, which provides end-to-end encryption, received a score of 7 out of 7 points on the scorecard. In August 2025, the German public media broadcaster NDR closed its tagesschau Telegram channel, which published summaries of news stories from the German television news service by the same name. In August 2024, an EU probe was launched into Telegram to determine whether the platform breached EU digital rules by failing to provide accurate user numbers.
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They also found that attackers had the theoretical ability to reorder messages coming from the client to the server though the attacker would not be able to see the content of the messages. It took 11 days for the database to be taken down, but the researchers say the data was accessed by other parties, including a hacker who reported the information to a specialized forum. The accounts were extracted from not Telegram but an unofficial version of Telegram, in what appears to be a possibly government-sanctioned fork.
Telegram
Examples of platforms providing Telegram bot integration include respond.io, Manychat and Trengo. In June 2015, Telegram launched a platform for third-party developers to create bots. The interface shows users a visual representation of their storage usage and also lets them sort their cached media by size to clear specific items.
- Messages from private chats can be forwarded, with an option to hide the original sender’s identity or to hide captions from media messages.
- This partially addresses the concern about the lack of scrutiny while confirming the formal security of the protocol’s latest version.
- Groups are large multi-user chats that support up to 200,000 members and can be public or private.
- For me, Telegram Web proved essential during my travels and work sessions on various devices.
- Pavel Durov has argued that this is because it helps to avoid third-party unsecured backups, and to allow users to access messages and files from any device.
- On 26 April 2023, Telegram was temporarily suspended in Brazil and fined R$1 million (2023) (US$185,528.76) per day for not complying with a Federal Police investigation into neo-Nazi activities on the platform.
In December 2020, a study titled “Automated Symbolic Verification of Telegram’s MTProto 2.0” was published, confirming the security of the updated MTProto 2.0 and reviewing it while pointing out several theoretical vulnerabilities. Criticisms were also aimed at Telegram’s use of a custom-designed encryption protocol. The editorial staff was made aware of the advertisement by a Telegram user and the online magazine Übermedien. This is seen as an issue for non-profit organizations and similar entities who want to operate a Telegram channel. As of August 2025, there was no option for channel owners to opt out of this mechanism. The revenue of these advertisements is shared with the channel owner in form of Telegram’s Toncoin crypto currency.
On 26 February 2014, the German consumer organization Stiftung Warentest evaluated several data-protection aspects of Telegram, along with other popular instant-messaging clients. Telegram has defended the lack of ubiquitous end-to-end encryption by saying that online-backups that do not use client-side encryption are “the most secure solution currently possible”. The desktop clients, excluding the macOS client, do not feature options for end-to-end encrypted messages. This partially addresses the concern about the lack of scrutiny while confirming the formal security of the protocol’s latest version.
Since July Kiekka Casino 2016, Line has also applied end-to-end encryption to all of its messages by default, though it has also been criticized for being susceptible to replay attacks and the lack of forward secrecy between clients. When the user assigns a local password in the desktop application, data is also locally encrypted. Pavel Durov has argued that this is because it helps to avoid third-party unsecured backups, and to allow users to access messages and files from any device. The NDR stated that they had not noticed these ads before, but closed the channel, stating that an advertisement-based accumulation of Toncoin, albeit unsolicited and not withdrawn, was unacceptable for a German public media broadcaster. Scammers employ a variety of confidence tricks to entice users into completing “prepaid tasks” in which users deposit money into scammers’ accounts with the expectation of receiving high returns.
One can use Telegram on a cell phone during the day, then move to a tablet or a laptop and continue the conversation at the same point where he or she left. Telegram further has personality-enhancing options such as animated stickers, themes, a built-in media editor, and GIFs. Admin tools are used to maintain the discussions to pin messages, replies, mentions, silent messages, slow mode, and permissions that are granular.