Bitcoin helps Durov “stay afloat”
Durov said that he has used his Bitcoin investment to fund his lifestyle. “Some people think if I’m able to rent nice locations or fly private, it’s because I somehow extract money from Telegram,” he said.
“Like I said, Telegram is a money‑losing operation for me personally. Bitcoin is something that allowed me to stay afloat.”
He predicted that “it will come to a point when Bitcoin is worth $1 million,” due to governments “printing money like no tomorrow.”
“Nobody’s printing Bitcoin,” he said, adding that it has predictable inflation and will stop being made at a certain point. “Bitcoin is here to stay. All the fiat currencies remain to be seen.”
Durov on TON
Durov, who was arrested a year ago in France and charged with facilitating crimes committed by Telegram users, also discussed the Telegram Open Network, which it developed in 2018 and 2019 to provide a blockchain for the messenger service.
Related: French officials pressured Telegram to censor Moldova election posts: Durov
He added that Bitcoin and Ether (ETH) were “not scalable enough to cope with the load that our hundreds of millions of users would create.”
The key innovation was inherent scalability through “shardchains,” he said. However, despite successfully developing the technology, Telegram couldn’t launch it due to regulatory restrictions in the US.
The project, now called The Open Network, is deeply embedded in the Telegram ecosystem and has gained momentum for non‑fungible tokens (NFTs).
“TON has become, I think, the largest or the second largest blockchain in terms of daily NFT trading volumes.”
The network’s native token Toncoin (TON) hit an all‑time high of $8.25 in mid‑2024 but has since fallen more than 67 % from that level.
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