Ivan's Illusions

Why I hate Pavel Durov

Hello dear RSS readers. Sorry for not posting for a year, whoops.

If you know me, you know I have a deeply personal vendetta against Pavel Durov. The man has said more stupid things than I have time to document. So I’m just covering one of his latest, because life is short.

For those who don’t know, Pavel Durov is the founder of Telegram and ex-CEO of VK. Though he likes to construct a narrative of him leaving VK out of his own volition due to “privacy concerns”, the reality is that he was thrown out for teasing the shareholders as an “April fool’s prank”.

He loves to boast about Telegram’s “privacy” over alternatives like WhatsApp or Signal — though, in reality, even WhatsApp beats Telegram in security by a considerable margin. This is, in part, because Telegram’s support for e2ee is limited and nonexistent in practice.

Telegram also happens to break the literal #1 rule of crypto: never roll out your own. Choosing to opt for their own poorly engineered protocol, MTProto.

I have not gone very deep into the MTProto rabbithole. However, I have seen some egregious things, truly shameful for any serious protocol. From jarring design choices, such as opting for AES-IGE instead of the standard AES-GCM or AES-CBC, to absolutely injustifiable things such as historically performing MAC-Then-Encrypt. Oddly enough, it also does not make use of standard Key Derivation Functions, opting for creating keys with in-house methods instead.

Still, Durov loves to run smear campaigns against his competitors, often using things such as lawsuits or baseless accusations from other people as his “sources”. It’s clear why, the Signal protocol is flawless and has gotten nothing but praise from the cryptographic community. Meanwhile, if you ask any cryptographer to review MTProto, they will look like a chef watching someone try to flip a pancake with a chainsaw.

And that’s just the crypto stuff. Obviously, his PR stunts scream desperation. When you look at the list of things he’s dealing with on top of the cryptography, it’s hilariously stacked:

• 12 criminal charges in France including child exploitation and drug trafficking as we all know.
• Separate terrorism investigation opened by Russia — out of all places — in February 2026.
• French investigation still ongoing despite leaving the country.
• Telegram only pulling ~$2B revenue vs Snapchat’s $5.9B at similar user count.
• His net worth collapsed from ~$16B to $6.6B in a year. More than half.
• $1.1 billion in bonds due by end of March 2026 (he tries to deny this).
• IPO essentially impossible at current valuation.
• Got arrested because his platform was a literal haven for crime.
• WhatsApp still has 2 billion users.
• Immediately started cooperating with authorities after arrest, destroying his “free speech hero” reputation.
• Russia throttling Telegram for not cooperating enough, so he’s getting attacked from both sides for contradictory reasons.
• multiple studies dropping showing Telegram being used for mass non-consensual image sharing and harassment.
• XChat launching, directly targeting his user base (though XChat itself is also a cryptographic joke).
• Signal’s reputation as the actual gold standard making Telegram look bad by comparison.

And this same guy who is currently behind TON (The Open Network), his blockchain. As of recent, that is; he has decided to move TONs ownership away from the TON foundation into Telegram, his private company.

This acquisition was part of his new project: Make TON Great Again — and no, I’m not making the name up. Yes, the privacy revolutionary named his blockchain revival project after a campaign slogan. We are in good hands.

His latest post on the matter was very… Interesting:

💎 Telegram becoming TON’s largest validator strengthens decentralization.

✅ It lets other major players join the validator pool without centralizing the network — with Telegram as the counterbalance.

📈 More and more TON gets locked in validation as everyone competes for 20%+ APR.

Let me point it out again.

Telegram becoming TON’s largest validator strengthens decentralization.

This guy just said that centralization powers decentralization.

I was shocked when I saw this, I’ve seen this guy say stupid stuff before, but this? This definitely wins the throphy, it makes no sense! No, centralization doesn’t strength decentralization, and no, the counterbalance argument doesn’t even hold up.

So, I’d like to bring a new perspective to you, because this post was certainly made for a reason.

To put it simply, TON is a PoS-based blockchain, Proof of Stake. Instead of proving your work to the network, you are proving a stake.

Instead of miners, the network has validators. These validators can put up a stake with a smart contract. They have to perform a task, and if they do it correctly, the network will rewarding by giving them their stake back along with a compensation.

However, if a validator tries to do something fishy (spend the same coin twice, be intentionally slow) the network can take away some of the stake and they may not get the reward.

This works because attacking the network requires a huge investment of capital, but a successful attack would crash the coin — instantly destroying that same investment. Attacking needs big capital, and the act of attacking devalues that same capital.

Why does this matter? What has Durov actually done? Well, although Durov doesn’t have full control over the blockchain, PoS-based networks don’t have a binary threshold where an entity may have full control. Instead, there are multiple thresholds.

While in the past Telegram stayed at arm’s length from TON, that changed with the inclusion of the MTONGA roadmap. Telegram absorbed the TON Foundation’s core roles, taking direct control of network maintenance and infrastructure.

Because of this, Telegram also deployed validator nodes across multiple data centers. This made Telegram’s validator stake skyrocket from less than 1% to around 25%.

This percentage is absolutely egregious, especially for a blockchain that claims to be “open” and “decentralized”.

It isn’t just a matter of ideology or purism, Telegram as a company now has the ability to block any protocol upgrades from taking place without their consent.

Admittedly, the next layer to this is no more than a conspiracy theory, but it’s a question worth asking: Who says 25% is where Durov stops?

In a public, permissionless blockchain, you don’t broadcast it if you are trying to completely take over the network, you hide it! Because TON enforces a strict maximum stake limit per node (around 2.425M TON), any large entity is already forced to split their capital across dozens of different validators. This creates the perfect smoke screen for a Sybil attack.

Durov claims Telegram will limit its corporate token holdings to 10% of the total supply to keep people happy. But nothing stops him from covertly spinning up dozens of secondary nodes using shell corporations, unlinked wallets, and different cloud providers (AWS, Google, Alibaba) to make them look like independent staking pools. Even simpler: he could have off-chain, legally binding agreements with the early “whale” wallets who mined billions of TON back in 2020.

On-chain, it looks like a decentralized network of hundreds of global validators. In reality, Durov could easily control the private keys or the voting allegiance of enough secret nodes to quietly push Telegram’s true consensus power past the 33.3% freezing threshold—or even the 75% absolute upgrade threshold.

But I think this also highlights one of the biggest issues in PoS: the value of the coin represents wealth, turning it into a literal plutocracy, where wealth directly equals lawmaking power. Unlike Proof of Work (PoW) where billionaires must constantly burn external real life assets like electricity to maintain their power, PoS allows an elite like Telegram to simply sit on their massive capital, collect the network’s rewards and permanently lock in their veto power. It’s not building a new decentralized, free web, it simply repackages the old financial system into a fancier cryptographic representation.

TON was infamous for its centralization issues, the entire software ecosystem was built around Telegram. If you wanted to use TON, you had to have Telegram. This only deepened the dependency.

Now, Telegram doesn’t only have control over the gateway into the network, they have full control of what code does and does not make it into the blockchain. It’s clear Durov never really cared about decentralization or the community, and now he’s making misleading posts to celebrate his takeover.

This is just a single post, don’t get me started on any on his posts about WhatsApp, let alone his infuriating posts on Signal.

The deeper you look, the more obvious it becomes that this is not a company or an individual worth defending. I think Durov’s latest moves are a good reminder that the guy behind the app is probably the most interesting thing in the entire Telegram story — not in a good way.

Published on 2026-05-27