⚡️ 2024 will go down in history as the year when hundreds of millions of people became familiar with blockchain. We’re proud that Telegram is at the epicenter of this societal transformation 🤵

🔥To keep the fire going, this month, we will introduce a mini app store and an in-app browser with support for Web3-pages 😮

❗️ We will also step up our efforts to fight the scammers seeking to defraud new entrants into the crypto realm. Soon, Telegram will begin displaying the month of registration and principal country for public accounts (similar to Instagram). We will also allow organizations to use their mini apps to issue labels for channels, creating a decentralized marketplace for third-party verification ✔️

😏 Thanks to more transparency and decentralization, Telegram users will know more about the opportunities and the dangers of this new world 💪

🚩 Big day! Today we introduce the Telegram Browser and Mini App Store, plus many other innovations ✨🍬

🖥 The Browser lets users switch between viewing websites and messaging, merging communication with news consumption. It is equipped with all the features you would expect from a browser — like search, bookmarks, and multiple tabs 🤩

💎 Most importantly, Telegram Browser allows people to view decentralized websites called TON Sites. This opens the world of blockchain-based web (often called Web 3.0) to almost a billion users. To try it out, update Telegram and open a link (like tonsite://getting-started.ton) 🌐

⭐️ Users can now gift Stars to their friends, who will be directed to the Mini App Store for examples of apps that accept Stars. To check out the mini app catalog, go to the 'Apps' tab in Search 🔎

🔝 Speaking of mini apps, they have a whole new way to spread virally across the Telegram ecosystem — via Stories, which also got an upgrade today with covers and smart animated weather widgets ☀️

💪 We’re proud to ship this. Try it all yourself or check out the video demos on the blog. Enjoy your summer holidays — we’ll keep building 👨‍💻

🐵 Humans are hardwired to copy others by evolution — for a good reason. Mimicking those around us has been the most efficient survival strategy for millions of years. However, the world is different today. We now live in an age of rapid change — what used to be efficient becomes a recipe for mediocrity and decay ☠️

🥂 Let 2025 be the year we rely on our own opinions — not imposed stereotypes and outdated thought patterns. Only by trusting our instincts and following our own unique paths can we fulfil our potential and make great contributions to the world 🎨

🎆 Have a happy and productive 2025, everyone! 🚩

💭 This is what the brightest minds of Silicon Valley are saying about The Open Network.

Peter Fenton, Partner at Benchmark:

📝 Telegram’s user base, which is expected to grow to over 1.5 billion through 2030, creates an unprecedented opportunity in the history of humanity to provide ubiquitous financial flows that have been limited until now to information flows, TON provides the backbone for human-scale democratization of financial activity.📝

Micky Malka, Founder at Ribbit:

📝 Ribbit partners with exceptional teams tackling and solving the world’s biggest problems. TON and Telegram exemplify this, working together to expand financial access globally by coupling the best technology with a seamless consumer experience.📝

Tim Draper, Founder of Draper Associates:

📝 I’ve been a long-time believer in the potential of blockchain to disrupt traditional industries and systems. TON’s technology is highly impressive, and its integration with Telegram provides it with a distribution that no other blockchain can match.📝

Shaun Maguire, Partner at Sequoia Capital:

📝 The TON team is the best in the world at the intersection of consumer product thinking and crypto infrastructure. When you combine this with the global distribution of Telegram, we’re very excited to see where they go.📝

🔮 I know only a few people who can spot technology trends as sharply as Peter, Micky, and Tim — and most of the others have also invested in TON. I haven’t met Shaun from Sequoia yet, but from everything I’ve heard, he’s just as visionary as the rest of this stellar group of investors 💫