🏆 Telegram and TON Core just launched a new contest for developers with a generous prize fund of $200,000 – and this is just for the first round 💰

⭐️ Exceptional participants will be able to join the Telegram team or the TON Core team. Their contest code may also be used to improve the TON blockchain 🚀

Competition drives progress! 📈

🤝 We agreed with the TON Foundation to make TON the exclusive blockchain partner of Telegram. TON will be our blockchain infrastructure for tokenization, payouts, mini app integrations, and more 🏆

🙂 This standardization will be great for Telegram users — giving them a consistent, predictable experience and better protection against scams 🛡

🖥 Mini app developers can check out the Blockchain Guidelines to see what’s new. I foresee a wave of innovation coming from this strong integration between Telegram and TON 🔗

⭐ Happy Chinese New Year!

Following the success of the Chinese startup DeepSeek, many are surprised at how quickly China has caught up with the US in AI. However, China’s progress in algorithmic efficiency hasn't come out of nothing. Chinese students have long outperformed others in math and programming at international olympiads 🏆

When it comes to producing outstanding performers in math and science, China's secondary education system is superior to that of the West. It fosters fierce competition among students, a principle borrowed from the highly efficient Soviet model 🎖

In contrast, most Western schools discourage competition, prohibiting public announcements of students' grades and rankings. The rationale is understandable — to protect students from pressure or ridicule. However, such measures also predictably demotivate the best students. Victory and defeat are two sides of the same coin. Eliminate the losers — and you eliminate the winners ☯️

For many students, motivation to excel in high school comes from treating it as a competitive game, striving to rank first against strong opponents. Removing transparency in student performance can make school feel meaningless for ambitious teenagers. It’s not surprising that many gifted kids now find competitive gaming more exciting than academics — at least in video games, they can see how each player ranks 😵

Telling all students they are champions, regardless of performance, may seem kind — until you consider how quickly reality will shatter this illusion after graduation. Reality, unlike well-meaning school policies, does have public grades and rankings — whether in sports, business, science, or technology. AI benchmarks that demonstrate DeepSeek's superiority are one of such public rankings. And more are coming. Unless the US secondary education system undergoes radical reform, China’s growing dominance in technology seems inevitable 🇨🇳

Telegram’s third major update this year is out. With it, we’re taking another step towards supporting our own video platform: meet video covers, saved progress, and timestamp sharing 😏

And don’t miss the new AI-powered sticker search! Now, you can intuitively find the perfect fit from millions of user-created stickers in 29 languages. We’ll continue expanding the index in future updates — once we clean out the not-so-kosher (and not-so-halal) ones 🦶

Over the past 5 weeks, thousands of users asked us to add new gifts 🎁

So today, we’re launching 9 limited-edition gifts: 🎁🎁🎁🎁🎁🎁🎁🎁🎁

And 4 of them 🎁🎁🎁🎁 can be instantly upgraded into unique collectibles👑

Happy Valentine’s Day!💖

It took 6 minutes for this entire collection to sell out. People paid over $200 for each of the 2000 hearts. $400,000 in 6 minutes 😎

15,000 Loot Bags costing about $50 each sold in 24 minutes, $750,000 total. Once minted, they turn into insanely beautiful art pieces 🫠

In just one hour, all the rings are gone ⛔️
35,000 items, ~$20 each. That’s $700,000 in sales — while most people were asleep 💤
At this rate, we’ll run out of Valentine’s gifts in no time.
Are they too cheap? 🧐

All nine Valentine’s gifts sold out within a few hours, totaling over $5M.
We’ll have to release more — can’t have our American users waking up to empty shelves 😑

#️⃣ I wrote about MemHash earlier — a mini app single-handedly built over a weekend. It inspired dozens of copycats and established an entirely new genre of mining mini apps on Telegram.

📈 MemHash proved there’s always room for a new app on Telegram — provided you deeply understand which features made its predecessors popular. The key is to borrow only what works while innovating and differentiating elsewhere 💡

✉️ This is exactly how Telegram itself became popular. We didn’t invent messaging, but in 2013, we took only what was necessary from existing apps. Then, by continuously listening to users and innovating, we introduced hundreds of new useful features over 12 years. This not only brought Telegram immense popularity but also helped establish a new genre of messaging 💭

💡 I know Telegram’s success story inspired the creator of MemHash, and I hope future app creators will draw inspiration from us as well. Good luck! 🍀