Telegram: Is Now in the USA and Armed with Crypto Services
July 28, 2025
This blog post is the work of an authentic dinobaby. Sorry. No smart software can help this reptilian thinker.
Telegram in the US is so yesterday. The company is 13 years old. The founder is awaiting trial in France for some charges related to a dozen or more French laws and regulations. The TONcoin has been in the lower tier of the crypto currencies for more than a year. The firm released yet another programming language in the hopes of luring more developers to its platform.
But two allegedly accurate facts about this firm founded by Pavel Durov, the fellow who created the “Russian version of Facebook.” I spotted these in an online publication called TechCrunch. “Telegram’s Crypto Wallet Launches in the US” reports:
Telegram is expanding access to its crypto wallet for its 87 million users in the U.S.
The article includes an assertion that 100 million Telegram Messenger users have activated their crypto wallets. Furthermore, these 100 million people execute 334,000 transactions on the Nikolai Durov-Level1 blockchain every 24 hours. That works out to about 13,900 per hour or 231 per second. No benchmark data from other blockchain services are included in the write up.
My team and I estimated that the Telegram Messenger eGame “Hamster Kombat” attracted about 300 million Telegram users. The “points” in that game were HAMSTR crypto tokens. STAR tokens, a Telegram invented device, were also involved. In order to “cash in” these points for other crypto, the Messenger wallets may have been required for some of these “moves.”
The numbers, like most Telegram user data, are soft and difficult to verify.
Several observations:
- The TON Foundation indicated at the Gateway Conference in 2024 that there were about five million users of Telegram in the US in 2023. The jump to 87 million users is notable and either [a] an indication that Telegram Messenger is a bigger player in the US than believed or [b] Telegram and the TON Foundation are exaggerating their data
- If Telegram does have more than one billion users, the active use of the Telegram crypto wallet is a rather dismal 10 percent of the user base. With Telegram working to build out its crypto services, the “success” of the firm is either [a] disappointing or [b] another bogus number.
- The eGame Hamster Kombat drew three times the number of Telegram users than the Messenger crypto wallet. This means that either [a] the crypto “play” mounted by Telegram after the US SEC investigation in 2020 and 2021 is moving at a snail’s pace or [b] the reported figures are incorrect.
Net net: Verifiable data about Telegram, its proxies, and its business activities are fuzzy. One fact is verifiable: Pavel Durov, the “owner” of Telegram Company, is awaiting trial in France for a number of serious charges.
Stephen E Arnold, July 29, 2025
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