Inside Telegram’s Plan to Bank 3 Billion People ft. Manuel Stotz from the TON Foundation

25:30And I've used the same thing. We're migrating across this new world where there's higher returns on capital, more personal freedom and all of the things that make nations great and we've created this digital i think continent maybe a digital world of which we can migrate across to and that slow thing i even think about things like how i've thought about it stuff like okay we can go and live in in crypto land which we do because we have we keep our savings and do our purchases and whatever But things like I think of the ETFs as like FDI. So you're taking money direct from Fiat World, but it's still linked to Fiat World.

26:11So it's kind of hot money flows. FDI is VC. It's the same model of a globalized economy. It just happens to be the fastest growing economy the world has ever seen. And as you rightly say, it's made up of sub-nation states. So of which Bitcoin is the largest and Ethereum is the second largest. and then there's other fast-growing nations and some will not make it and some will make it and it's the rise and fall of nations going on. Absolutely, yeah. And of course, this is not too dissimilar when America was discovered and there's different countries and it wasn't clear that North America was going to be so much more successful than South America, for instance, from a resource endowment perspective and so forth.

26:52And arguably, again, I'm a history buff, so I don't want to sidetrack the conversation too much, But I think this is a very apt analogy. And I think this is, you know, I see the development of this industry in that sort of line of ideas. So I want to go back to 2020 and your Bitcoin story, and then I want to know how it morphed into a ton story. So I want to hear this. So, as I said, I mean, I've probably heard about Bitcoin first in like, I don't know, 2015, 16. I have a younger partner who is much more clever than I am. He's been, I think, in Bitcoins since 2012 and runs a full node and a home miner.

27:29And he's been pounding the table. But, you know, I was like, you know, A, I was super busy running the business and traveling the world and raising capital and, you know, dealing with all the problems that we've talked about. But frankly, I didn't take it seriously. I was like, what? Magic beans, you know, magic internet money. I was at Goldman Sachs, you know, I was like, I'm a value investor for God's sake. Yeah. And, and like, and, and the reality is like, that's the natural reaction, right? Because, you know, humans, whether we like it or not, we are, you know, quite judgmental creatures in a way we have to judge, right?

28:00You know, because, you know, is it dangerous? Is it safe? Is it good? Like, is it tiger? No. And, and of course, everyone judges, I mean, in my experience, at least certainly people with my background that, you know, oh my God, this doesn't sound right, right? And then what's happening is when you encounter it again and again, and at some point, of course, realize you haven't really thought about it at all. You know, Carl Jung, the German sort of psychoanalyst said, you know, most people, like thinking is hard. That's why most people don't do it and they judge, right? And you have to admit to yourself that you were wrong judging the first time around, and that takes humility.

28:32And humility is in, you know, dramatically short supply in the financial profession and beyond, right? And so once I realized what this is and read the Bitcoin standard and went to bet with Bitcoin podcasts and, of course, I had this experience with these frontier emerging market currencies. I said, this is at least a decent part of the solution. And we want to express this with our institutional capital. And we started with Bitcoin mining. Like it's a very, yeah, I mean, in the bull market, it works, but like it's a tough business. And then we branched out into, you know, other Bitcoin lending and, you know, some of the lightning related companies.

29:17And then we branched out outside of the Bitcoin ecosystem. And look, I'm not a maximalist. I think the case of maximalism, I think, is reasonably strong. Like, you know, Buffett is a fundamentalist on never selling a great business. But yeah, I'm not a fundamentalist. And then I got interested in blockchain gaming, for instance. So we became the largest shareholder of a company called Animoca. I think Yat's been on your show. I saw Yat at dinner with him in Dubai the other day. And that picked up in the Philippines, as you remember, in the summer of 21. So we saw that early and then got in early, luckily.

29:50Blockchain gaming hasn't fully lived up to its promise. But I've no shadow down my mind. Like Roblox is a great example. Of course, that's not on-chain, but you could easily see that will become on-chain. And it just takes a while to put together AAA games that are not just having a sort of economic component, but also really good fun and competitive on a global level. And that's happening. We then, when the sort of cycle turned, we got involved in a company called blockchain.com. So that was an unusual investment for us. And it was a bit more later stage, but there was a sort of balance sheet when the cycle turned, basically repairment required.

30:26So we got involved there. Yeah, they're good friends of mine as well, those guys. Yeah, they're, I think, the third biggest surviving of the three original OG Western crypto companies after Coinbase and Kraken. And then we got introduced to Ton. And yeah, and then the rest, I mean, I'm happy to, of course, go into a lot more detail there. Yeah, so, okay, so you see Ton. What is interesting because of the size of the network that exists? Well, what is it that you're thinking about when you see Ton as an investment? We'll talk about the foundation as we go, but let's start with the investment pieces you saw.

31:00Right. I mean, first of all, the moment always starts with the people, right? The founder, the jockey, the team, right? And I would say credit where credit is due. You know, Pavel Durov arguably is the GOAT, the greatest of all time in his particular domain. In ten years, you can debate, is it Federer, is it Djokovic, Alcaraz, right? But in messaging, social media at large, the debate is settled, right? You know, how many founders walk the face of the earth, right, that have built an app that a billion people use every month. You know, you could name a handful. And, you know, but then how many of those are owned 100 % by one person?

31:34There's only one. So Pablo is the only living human being that has basically achieved this without, you know, a dollar of marketing spent or a dollar of equity delusion. And he's a very intense, you know, talented, like, you know, sort of Elon level type founder, in my humble opinion, who also hasn't sold his soul and sacrificed his principles. And he's paying a pretty big price for this. You know, Meta today has 400 product managers. Zuckerberg ain't one of them. And Telegram's got one product manager and it's Pavel, right? You know, and he doesn't even drink caffeine, let alone alcohol. Like he's on a mission.

32:09And the team is like 30 core engineers or so. That's like the bulls in the 90s sort of thing, right? And then his brothers may be even smarter, you know. Now, granted, I haven't met his brother and I probably couldn't hold a conversation with that man. But he is Nikolai Durov, perhaps world's best mathematician, computer scientist and cryptographer of that generation, at least. And he's basically at age eight. He was solving cubic equations live on TV in his head, which the math community thought was impossible. My eight-year-old daughter is in horseback riding. I'm reasonably smart. I don't know what a cubic equation is, truly.

32:46and then he won the global maths and cs olympiads you know two times in a row and that's on the maximum amount you can do them and um and he's the the technical uh sort of engineering brain well parvel is product and he's designed to take the backbone for their first business vk then telegram where's the cto and uh ton coin where nicolai is the author of the white paper at least that's the rumor um and so so yeah i mean that's i think a really interesting combination and then And of course, you're sitting on a messaging app with a billion users, right? And in my opinion, all these blockchains have basically a chicken and egg problem, right?

33:24Now, why would anyone use Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, or Soi, or Toncoin if no one else uses it, right? So you have to have these adoption waves and the diehard community, and it takes a while and a few cycles. Classic chicken and egg. Now, we have a chicken called Telegram. Can we lay the egg? That is the question, right? But I think we can. And another quote that comes to mind is, there's a very famous phrase from Bill Gates, who said in the late 90s, when the internet came first about, and Yad keeps repeating that to me, content is king, right? Content is king. And of course, who am I to disagree with Bill Gates in the late 90s?

33:58I also believe that content is king, but distribution is the queen and she's wearing the pants. At least in my household, the point is you want the content and the distribution. And in the age of AI, I think the content is more at risk of being commoditized. relative to the distribution. And so here what we've got is you've got a network state, and you're now trying to get the adoption of a new technology within the network state, which is that whole thing about Kenya. There's 45 million people. Can you get them to adopt there? Now, I think this is why Ton to me is so fascinating, because everybody else has done it the other way around, and this way around, right?

34:35Yet to be proven, but there's a clear thesis, which makes sense. The only people who ever tried it before got shut down by every government on earth. And that was the Diem project at Facebook. I'm on the foundation, as you know, of SUI, which is that team, because they couldn't do it at Facebook because it got shut down. So this is the big experiment to me. This is fascinating. Absolutely. Look, I mean, this is, as you say, I mean, it could be a trillion dollar idea, right? But don't take my word for this. Take Zuckerberg, right? Last time I checked a trillion eight market cap, hard to move your needle at this point.

35:10You know, he thought this could, right? And for me, the other really important analogy is actually in the East, Tencent, China. How did Tencent become a trillion-dollar enterprise at that time? Asia's most available corporation, right? You had basically WeChat in the middle, the messenger, that then became what we now call basically, for lack of a better word, super app. And we don't have the super app in the West. You know, imagine, you know, in one app, in this case, WeChat, you not only have your Messenger, but you have your Uber, your Amazon, your Spotify and everything else, including all the banking, granted no blockchain in one app and then the gaming.

35:46Right. So so I think, you know, this is really the analogy. And, you know, Tencent was a spectacular investment. I mean, there's my old friend Zhang Lei from Hill House. You know, he put money into Tencent in the 2005 or so contents, didn't keep all of it. But the rest is history. And, you know, NASPERS, now ProSource, you know, a legacy media company from beautiful Cape Town, South Africa. I think they put something like 30 million to Tencent around the same time and they kept most of it. And that became a 6 ,000 X or something like that. Now, it took 15 years, granted, right? But my point is, so never in the, you know, and I was modestly, of course, successful perhaps.

36:25And before I got into, you know, crypto at all, into Ton, but never in the history of my career have I seen the stars align in this constellation. You've got such a world-class proven team, like Elon-level founders. And of course, the team around the engineers around them, I can name a few more names. But let's just say they've done it once with VK, twice with Telegram. Can they do it again? I think so. With such an unfair competitive advantage, if you own a messenger, it's not really a fair fight. Going after what could be a trillion dollar prize, we're still cut very, very early in the journey.

36:58And again, it's no longer a fringe view. I mean, we announced last quarter, you know, backing by, you know, our friends from Silicon Valley. So there's been a press release with, you know, Sequoia, Benchmark, Ribbit and others. Pantera, I think Dan has been on your show. And Mickey Malka is a good friend of mine as well. Yeah, Mickey has been terrific, of course. He's been, again, Venezuela 2010. He understands the game. For sure. And Ben says, you know, this is not for incidents, right? No, Wences as well, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so go ahead. Because the other person is going to walk into this space clearly.

37:38Well, it's clear that Meta will do something, but maybe it's a stable line. Let's see. It's what Elon does is going to be interesting because he does have a network and he's trying to create a super app and finance is a big part of what he's aiming at. So that'll be interesting. And you guys have kind of, or Telegram has partly partnered with him to be able to use the AI on Telegram. It's interesting. Yeah. So just on that, I think you're actually right. It's very curious to see what Zuckerberg and Meta end up doing. The announcement is clearly that they're going back in. I think they're Elon more focused on AI right now, unsurprisingly.

38:14But in your WhatsApp now, you have the AI basically in your chat, right? So you can just ask it. And of course, everyone knows what's going on with CROC on X and OpenAI. But it's interesting that if you're Zuckerberg, you're not going to help any other layer one, any other stablecoin or any other AI player. You're going to do it all yourself, right? So if you want access to the largest open distribution in the Western world, which is Telegram, you kind of got to talk to Pavel, right? And whether it's Tether, which is a big partner of Tom already, we had at that point the fastest launch of Tether ever last April, sort of from zero to like a billion in like, I think, eight months.

38:53And of course, we are very, very strong supporters of Tether, But, you know, we'll also need to, of course, consider launching other stable coins. And we are also entering the U.S. market, which we should touch on maybe next. And on the AI side, look, I mean, it was a bit unfortunate last week. And I can't, of course, speak on behalf of neither. But there was an announcement and it was unfortunate that it was done sort of a little bit prematurely. And it is true that it hasn't been signed yet. And you can read it all on X. But, you know, I would hope that, you know, cooler heads prevail. And then this is, you know, a partnership that can be done.

39:32And frankly, they probably need each other, right, in a way, right? I mean, the alliances are sort of forming. The AI wars are going cross-platform. And again, distribution is the queen, right? And Telegram has it. So what is your job now at the foundation? What are you trying to achieve? You've got the currency. It's launched. There's a network. Yeah. What is your job? How on earth are you going to get this across the line? How are you going to develop this ecosystem and economy for the next 10 years? Well, it is my first digital nation. So first, I'm just over 100 days into the job. We call you King Manny now.

40:12Are you a dictator? Not at all. No, no, no. By the people, for the people, from the people. I'm the president of his office at ours. You know, you can, again, I don't take any compensation. I'm doing this frankly for the greater good for the mission and again it doesn't suit me and of course I need to manage my day-to-day as well which is why I've brought in a strong team so really consider me just more like a chairman role where of course the first 100 days were very active but now we've defined a strategy which I can talk about we brought in the leadership team we hired a CEO who's one of the co-founders of Moonpay an old friend of mine German execution operator and And yeah, he's sort of whipping this organization into shape, I would say.

40:54Good goalkeeper, you know, clean slate, right? Germans are the best goalkeeper nation in football or soccer, as you call them. And of course, a lot of important people around him. And now we are fully in execution mode. And the priority number one is coming to the US. So Ton has avoided the US under Biden-Harris. And maybe that was overly conservative. But, you know, Independence Day is near. So around the 4th of July, you can expect what I would call a sort of decisive market entry. What does that mean? You know, for U.S. users, you might not know this, but, you know, within the Telegram app, there is basically a wallet for non-U.S.

41:27users in the settings menu. And we're going to basically lift the geoblock. It is currently geoblocked and has been since inception for U.S. users around the 4th of July. and telegram you know without stating so detailed numbers but had over or just under 100 million downloads just in the us just in ios over the last 12 months right and as you might know no one has actually won the messaging game proper in the us yet there's tons of iMessage tons of sms whatsapp is big but not as big as it is internationally and of course there's signal and and telegram and so it's gonna be really interesting and then we of course are you know keen to list on all the relevant US spot exchanges, which is coming.

42:09I can't, of course, share too many details, but you can, of course, expect. I mean, it's a big enough project. I mean, your FDV is very high. It's a big project. Yeah, and of course, I mean, I would say it's of all the contenders for like trillion dollar protocols. And of course, TON is by no means the only one. I mean, of course, there's Bitcoin at$2 trillion and Ethereum, I've peaked, I think, at$450 billion and sort of had a bit of a speed bump. Hopefully they're going to, you know, reconnect with their identity, what capitalism looks like. And you can expect me as the Ton Foundation president to be, let's say, commercial as the history of my career as an investor.

42:48And of course, I've been deeply impressed by Solana. They have executed, you know, really well. And of course, in Soy and Apdos, you know, there's lots of activity there, right? But of course, every chain is a superpower, right? And we're not trying to imitate or frankly, even sort of compete with other chains, we think we want to grow the pie, right? You know, we want to bring in hundreds of millions of users, ultimately billions of users. And the first billion is the hardest in my humble experience, right? So Telegram is not stopping. You know, we're at 1 billion, 2 billion, 3 billion, maybe more.

43:16That's the plan, right? And Pavel, of course, is, you know, the gloves are off. I mean, he's very, very, very, very focused on this, right? And the key question we have is how do we basically convert the Telegram messaging user to a blockchain user large, but of course, specifically, specifically ton. And of course we can do things that other chains just can't do, right. From a UI UX perspective and so forth. And, and, and, you know, telegram is there's 10 million businesses on telegram who effectively run their business on telegram. Most of them are small, some are not that small. So there's like platforms, like the bot platform, the ads platform, the mini app platform.

43:52And we can sort of just align the incentives here that basically benefits the whole industry at large, but of course, specifically with a focus on driving adoption for TronCoin. And what is the vision for Tron itself? What role does it play within the ecosystem? Is it the kind of infrastructure layer that things get built on top of and that generates the economic activity? Is it the loyalty layer? Is it the currency layer? What the fuck is it? Well, I guess it's a bit like the blind people touch an elephant, right? But Now, when I would say, you know, if this is the, not the network state, but the network continent, if this is Satorica, the United States of Satorica, you know, what Telegram is doing, right?

44:33And it is basically freedom of speech, right? It is the, you know, free speech messaging platform that respects user privacy. And, and, and of course, it's not a coincidence that, you know, that's the first amendment in the U.S. Constitution, right? Now, what Ton does is basically providing the property rights layer, basically the economic layer. And the mission in one sentence is putting freedom into orbit, whether that's freedom of speech or freedom to transact, voluntary exchange, free markets, and of course also banking the unbanked in the end. And freedom isn't free. The mission has to be financed.

45:11We're also, of course, compensating Telegram for the exclusivity that Ton has with the messenger. and, you know, the point is putting freedom to orbit. I mean, it might sound a bit cheesy, but, you know, the difference of basically launching a rocket and reaching orbit, if you don't reach orbit, you come down. If you reach orbit, it stays there for a thousand years, like forever, right? And I think this is, you know, really important as a mission because, you know, there's governments in authoritarian regimes that have other ideas, right? They want the central bank digital currency linked to a social credit score, linked to QR codes and digital IDs and sort of digital dystopia, right?

45:50And I'd much rather, you know, I'm on Team Freedom, right? Much rather make sure that freedom prevails and the American idea is going to take us into the next, you know, decades and centuries. And that's really what I'm here for, right, in terms of mission. Yeah, but what do people use the TonCoin for? Right, of course. What's it going to be used for over time? You know, what's in your head? obviously you hope to be directionally right your whatever you think it's going to be it's not going to be that because that's how things develop but what what's in your head i mean the list of real world use cases and i get this question a lot and i was like what do you mean like isn't it obvious uh sort of is quite endless right i mean um for instance uh you know i mean of course you american users will know what venmo is right you can venmo each other like that basically works in telegram today outside the us it's coming to the edge you can just click your telegram contact with press a button and that person doesn't even need to have a wallet you can still send him coins and if they don't have a wallet yet they just get a button say click and you deactivate a wallet and you get the coin whether it's a ton coin or a u.s dollar stable coin that that runs on ton right so your remittances is a you know trillion dollar market right payments of course is a lot bigger and you know what happened in china basically that every corner shop has a qr code right displayed and you can just basically scan it and then transact uh of course online but also offline um uh you know we talked about mpesa right there is a a trillion dollar of what's called mobile money in the world 80 800 billion of that sits in africa right again and and i think that will as smartphone penetration in africa uh rises and you know telegram is very popular 80 of telegram users sit in emerging and frontier markets um of course and they might want the dollar right they might not want the ton coin um they can also own bitcoin or other you know in in the in the custodial wallet you can buy sui as well in the telegram wallet right you know we have the open network right we're trying to grow the pie for for the whole industry um and then of course there's the wonderful world of you know sort of digital property rights whether that's nfts as you know gifts on telegram have you know we have got three million dollars a day it's not all on chain yet granted but you know that's more than open sea like it's just telegram gifts right where you can of course you know who doesn't like gifts right either gifting them or getting them whether it's a valentine's day a birthday or christmas or whatever it is and you can you know put them on your profile now.

48:04And of course, some of them are rarer than others. And so that's a really interesting sort of real-world use case. You've got gaming, of course. We had last year, which, of course, is not where we end up, but where we started. The tapping game phenomenon, not coin, and then, you know, caters and dogs and hamster. And, you know, you could have basically proved the point, right, that you could add basically one or even two zeros compared to all the experiments, let's say, that have happened in blockchain gaming, you know, in the prior cycle, where, Axie Infinity, wonderful pioneers, but they peaked at 2.7 million monthly active users.

48:39And Notcoin, I think, at 40 million out of the gate within weeks. This is very viral. And then the others were even bigger, some of them in the low hundreds of millions. So, of course, again, we need higher quality games. That's coming. And then you see influencers actually monetizing on Telegram with the help of AI. You know, like U.S. influencers, you know, on their Instagram, right, a meta property where the monetization is increasingly more difficult. They basically link their Telegram. You can hop in, you chat to them. It's, of course, AI. It's an LLM that is trained on the influencer's tone of voice.

49:12And they have a million conversations in parallel with their fans. And then they, you know, you can request sort of more unique sort of limited edition content. You have to pay, right? There's something called Telegram Stars, which I'm sure the audience is familiar, but that's basically an in-app currency, not on-chain, but half of all stars are bought with TonCoin. And that, of course, also avoids the Apple and Google fees. And, of course, now we have the Epic ruling, so that's a big positive for us. And currently, actually, half of stars are spent on gifts, unsurprisingly, perhaps. So I can go on.

49:46So is your focus, therefore, because sitting on the Tsui Foundation, for example, our focus is finding people to partner with who want to build on. But you don't need to do that so much as say, we've got a network. So if you're coming to our network to do stuff, we've got this new amazing tool of which you can do things with. It's kind of somewhat different. You're not going to Germany and say, why don't you put your driving licenses on tons? What you're doing is saying, listen, we've got this massive network. Come and build stuff here. Correct. Yeah. I mean, we're trying to be less sort of convincing by dishing out grants and spending a lot of money to acquire users.

50:26Quite the opposite. We are saying, look, plug in here and we can add a zero or two to your user base.

50:34And of course, the commercial terms, we have done grants, we'll do grants in the future. But we want to focus on the big stuff, the stuff that really moves the needle. You know, there's like, you know, a million things to do. And there's like five things that matter. Well, let's get those right. So the strategy is called focus, right? U.S. market entry. Clearly, that's a big one, right? As you know, the U.S. is what? 70 % of all, you know, global capital markets and equities and stuff like that, right? We're not even in the U.S. proper yet at all. That's coming, right? And doubling down on stablecoins, right?

51:03I mean, stablecoins is one of the largest and most exciting parts of this industry. You know, huge TAM, massive network effect. tethers making more money than gold and sacks uh with like you know uh considerable less people and uh and um the u.s government wants it right and who's going to buy the you know u.s bonds it's not going to be the chinese the you know the russians the saudis or even the japanese it's going to be tether and circle which you know hopefully is going to go public this week and um and of course it's faster cheaper 24 7 you can take self-custody a wonderful innovation right Right.

51:36And so what we're doing is the big stuff. Stablecoins is definitely in that category. You know, gaming will be in that category. Platform monetization will be in that category. And then we've got some blanks to fill. We're not properly in Korea yet. We're not on Upbit, you know. So hopefully that will come. And so we're quite early, actually. Right. And we also haven't really told the story well enough. And we want to also tell the story really well to the developers. Right. So maybe this is another call. Hopefully you have developers in your audience. But, you know, you can build on Telegram, on Ton, and you can monetize.

52:07And, of course, the world's best Web3 developers tend to sit in the U.S., right? And we're just coming into the market. I think you'll find just because of Telegram is a unique thing, people will build different use cases than we've seen yet use elsewhere. And I think that's going to be fascinating what people think of is like, how do I build things for the network? Like we saw it got built on top of Telegram already and what's been built on top of Facebook, these kind of closed networks, really different stuff can be built. Yeah, and like we were starting with the basics, right? Like almost like a Revolut type experience on Telegram, just default global, right?

52:43Where you can have a dollar account, let's give it to them, whether that's a Tether or Circle or USD1 or something like that. Paxos could be interesting because they share the yield. And then a dollar with the yields, right? I call it the digital money market fund. Again, I think the best comparison is, again, China, Tencent and Alibaba. When they launched a digital money market fund, one of them was called leftover treasure, you know, very Chinese. You sweep it in from your checking account into your yield account. They went to 100 billion each, like in no time, right? Bigger than the, I think, J.P.

53:14Morgan Prime money market fund at that time, right? So we just launched Athena, right? And of course, real world assets is another big topic, right? Telegram has$1.7 billion of convertible bonds. They just refinanced them last week. And we're trying to put also that on chain, right? So we have a captive issuer. And of course, it would be nice if that yield stays within the ecosystem and doesn't leak out to traditional finance, but stays in the country, in the network states, in the network continent, right? And so, and then, you know, we launched Tether Gold. You know, my respect for gold has grown a lot since I've gone down the rabbit hole here of Bitcoin and crypto, right?

53:51And of course, gold has done very well, might continue to do very well. And so now, you know, in emerging markets, as you know, like, you know, gold, the problem is, you know, to get the LME, whatever it is,$3 ,300 an ounce, you need to be rich, right? You know, if you're like a poor person in Africa, you might, or in India, you might get jewelry. But, you know, half of the, you know, I've got a, not even an ounce of gold in my wedding band here. But, you know, the, like half the cost of that item, of any jewelry item also, will be the craftsmanship and so forth. And now you can own a fraction of a fraction of gold in your telecom wallet in Nigeria.

54:21If you think about India, India has capital constraints. So they've been on and off with crypto. They'll get there eventually, on and off. An easy way of getting India into crypto is just by putting gold on chain. For sure. Yeah. And that's something we actually launched, I think, yesterday for one of the tether gold. And then what we can do now, and I don't want to steal too many thunder on the product side, but you can combine gifts with gold. You can actually have a watch that is an NFT that is actually linked to an amount of gold that sits on chain and you can redeem and so forth. That's cool stuff.

54:55And so the design space is just different. Look, I love crypto, right? But do I want to have a bunch of seed phrases flying around everywhere and have a Metamask wallet and bridge to this chain and pay gas fees? And I want to press buttons and expect it to work. The way I use the internet. If I use the internet or my mother, which she does, she doesn't know which protocol is running in the background. Is it, you know, HTTP, TCP, IP? Is it Linux? No, you press buttons and it works, right? You hop into your Telegram, now linked to your wallet, connected to a billion people, growing, right? You hop into a game, linked to your wallet.

55:26And then you have the AI in there as well, right? So my point is like, this is just, I think, a whole, yeah, another ecosystem, basically, that, you know, we can't bring in hundreds of millions of people. I'm not sure anyone can, right? And so I'm not likely to do this. I'm going to ask you the boomer question now, because I use Telegram every day. Yeah. I don't know where the fuck any of these applications are. I just message people. Yeah, I've got my wallet because you sent me some ton a long time ago. I don't know where anything else is. Where do I find the games? Where do I find any of this?

55:53Where do I find payment rails? How do I send you anything? It's so not obvious from that screen. Absolutely. Look, Rome wasn't built in a day, right? And I would say, again, I'm not happy with how, let's say, confusing some of the stuff looks. I just can't find it. I don't even know how to get to it. And discovery is a topic, right? But look, I've got full confidence that we can fix these things. And the challenge is also there is, of course, it's a global product, right? In the sense that in Asia, again, and of course, China is not the only one, but you have super apps in Korea, for instance, and to some extent in Japan.

56:32So we need to build for an audience that is not just a Western audience, right? Actually, quite the opposite. The majority of Telegram users, 80 % or so, sit in these frontier and emerging markets, right? But look, there's a lot of room for improvement. We're working hard on it, and we take the feedback on board and very seriously, and I would expect major sort of step changes in the sort of UI, UX over the next months, quarters, and of course years. Yeah, because as it moves away from being a messaging app, I know it's a lot more than that, but you kind of have to know how to do it. But sooner or later, it should become an easier experience, and then that will just help what you're trying to do at the foundation level, which is your job is to grow the ecosystem um and that's you know from my perspective as a friend of yours i would say the hardest thing is is that that ux part and ui because you have to know what you're doing if not you don't see it absolutely and and frankly also there's this you know since we're having sort of a friendly conversation about this there there comes um you know it's not like so dutch disease but you know because you know we have all this like distribution power you know there is sometimes i think a a risk that you have a bit that complacency kicks in, right?

57:42Sort of, oh, we are telegrams already like over and we haven't done it yet. You know, we haven't, you know, it's a bit like, you know, the old Sequoia, like take down the posters, right? Like it's day one, like, you know, and, you know, to win a Formula One race, it's not about the, you know, absolute speed, but the relative speed to someone else. The other guys are hungry and they're accelerating, right? So we need to do that too, right? And so, yeah, so definitely there's, you know, with all this humility, like you know we are we haven't yet fully executed on this but you know we have of the next 18 months we're gonna give it our real best shot and and and gonna go super hard at this and i think it hasn't been going that long how long has it been launched for two years um yeah so um i mean yeah it's more been more like sort of three four years but your official let's say partnership with telegram was first announced announced in late 23 so that's not even that's 18 months ago frankly And what happened since, we had basically, you know, Pavel Durov on stage for the first time last year, Token 2049, launching USDT, well executed.

58:43We had this tapping game phenomenon and we had the, you know, ads platform being put on TonRails, right? And, you know, we had a very good momentum last year. Ton went from, I don't know, two bucks to eight by this time last year, roughly. Well, certainly last summer. and um and then we had a bit of a curveball in paris um happy talk about that too but yeah i want to talk a little bit about that is there is a perceived geopolitical risk with telegram because it's you know various you know partly russian connection stuff like that and this world is still you know us versus them whatever it is we're seeing that bifurcation yes how do we deal with that if it's a global if it's a global app yeah no i don't feel like i mean this is fear that the u.s suddenly wakes up angry or europe wakes up angry and before you know everything shut down i mean the u.s is actually not a problem but uh you know the the key question is raul whether the famous winston churchill quote uh also applies to europe will you know europe uh you know will always do the right thing but only after all other options have been exhausted and i'm not so sure speaking as a european it's not a process it was on my list of questions to ask you i have no idea what europe's doing within all of this but anyway that's talk me through that geopolitical side because you guys have lived it because of what happened to oh sure yeah yeah i mean of course you know the you know i mentioned the biography of pavel but you know what people need to understand is that you know um you know their first business vk it was and still is the single biggest social network in europe if you count russia into europe which it used to be and for me the interesting story about VK was that unlike China, which was a firewall, right?

1:00:26Neither Facebook or WhatsApp could have entered China and competed. Europe, including Russia, were open. So Facebook came, WhatsApp came, WeChat came in the end. And in most places, you know, I'm from Germany, especially the US players just ended up bulldozing the local competition, despite the locals being actually really well-funded and had the whole local VC and media landscape behind them. The network effects were too strong, but not in sort of Russia and Eastern Europe and sort of former Soviet Union states where the Dourav brothers basically crushed Facebook and WhatsApp and won the market.

1:00:54Of course, they had home turf advantage granted, but there was no regulatory like sort of firewall or reason like there was in China. So these guys are good. That did not happen in a lot of places. It was so good that the business got big. They had 100 million users 15 years ago. So big that the government got interested and eventually too interested, right? And there's a whole Tucker Carlson interview that Pavel gave last year. But basically what happened is the FSB came knocking, right, 15 years ago and said, oh, all this user data, give it to us. Oh, the opposition, we don't like him, shut all this stuff down.

1:01:23Ukrainians, no, no, no. And not only did Pavel Durov not comply with this stuff, even further, he published it, he sort of made fun of it almost, like, and of course, that had consequences with a picture of a dog saying, I'm not your lab dog, Mr. Putin, right? And if you want to get out alive, so this guy's got balls of steel, but also to a fault, right? Yeah, I mean, there's one person you don't fuck with on a personal level and that's putin because you just correct i mean i don't know how you protect yourself no look and this is this is actually when telegram was born right so in this you know his apartment got raided and like literally swat teams and and and everything was surveilled um and at this moment he had no um basically safe way to communicate online with his genius brother um because they were look you know everything was tapped right and so that's when the idea of telegram was born and so basically they eventually sort of folded this sold their stake and they got a raw deal there but not the end of the story took their money left the country ended up in dubai and um bought a bunch of bitcoin early that stretched of course so bitcoin is actually the reason that telegram has been independently financed for for such a long time yeah yeah yeah and so so pavel was a great debt and thank the world it was a great debt for for for bitcoins uh you know he went in i think 2012 2013 something like that and he have had a big exit, of course, relatively speaking.

1:02:41I think he had a$300 million exit or so, like, you know, roughly 13, 14 years ago. And yeah, and then, you know, so Telegram is now, yeah, definitely an app of, you know, geopolitical interest, let's say. And of course, he is, you know, someone who left the country where he was born, and keep in mind, he was born in the Soviet Union, and sort of, you know, he saw the two systems. He lived in Italy as a five-year-old, and he talks about all that in the Oslo interview. It's quite interesting. So he's on Team Freedom, right? And he's paying a big price for this. And so he was asked last week, are you a Russian asset?

1:03:16And of course, he said, look, I mean, I get quite annoyed when I get this question because I've paid a huge price to basically. And we don't know whether it's the Russians or other states, but there were attempts on his life, right? Sort of thing, right? And yeah, and what happened then in France, he was basically accused that he should be held responsible for everything illegal happening on the platform. which is not a problem that exists in the US. In the US, the large tech companies fought and won the battle many moons ago that the user is also beheld responsible. And if I have an Apple iPhone, right, which I do, and if I were to do something illegal with that iPhone, which I won't, right, but if I did, Tim Cook wouldn't land in jail.

1:03:56Like I would get a problem, right? But not, yeah. And so in Europe, we don't have basically the First Amendment or these sort of grown up, let's say, tested laws. And, you know, he's just being, he's a suspect that, you know, he should be held responsible for, you know, whatever happens on Telegram, which is a tool, right? And, of course, with a billion users, statistically speaking, you will have some bad apples, right? Luckily, they basically didn't find anything of substance. They went through everything and he got his travel ban lifted. So he's also in Dubai right now. But he still has to ask for permission, right?

1:04:32And it turns out now that actually the plot thickens, right? It's not just about, I don't know what the French said at the beginning. like, oh, child porn and stuff like this. You know, it's geopolitical, right? Pavel just went on the record saying he was approached by, you know, French intelligence and says, oh, elections in Romania. Can you please shut down this, this and this and this? We are building a NATO base there and we want this candidate to win. And of course, Telegram is not pro or against the other candidate. They have no position on this, but they're pro freedom of speech, right?

1:05:01And he went public with this, right? And it's not clear to me what the end game for the Europeans is. I mean, it's worse places to get stuck. Deeply concerning is Europe. I mean, you're kind of losing entrepreneurs because... Yeah, we're nowhere in AI, right? I mean, Germany where I'm from, we don't have nuclear power. And the car industry is being decimated from either Tesla on the left and then the Chinese on the right. And the problem is the lack of leadership. Like, who's actually in charge? And this really is sort of the fourth turning in my mind, right? Where, you know, the current generation of European leaders, And of course, you know, I should, with all humility, say like, you know, maybe I should be president or run for chancellor one day.

1:05:40But, you know, I've decided to, you know, build a digital nation. Like and I think, you know, my hope in Europe, you know, is still, of course, full of talent and has a history of turning things around. But it's not our proudest moment, to be fair. And the UK is no better either. Well, maybe the tallest midget, I would say. Right. But that's not a high bar these days. um yeah i mean i'm here um and um i'm not leaving but uh yeah a lot of people have left recently with uh new tax changes and uh yeah it's uh it's it's not clear to me what what the plan is but frankly i don't think they really have one right this is the honest answer no and when you look at the largest i think i still think the largest tech company in europe is sap and that was built in what 1980 something i mean that's a staggering yeah absolutely like this is like there's a dinosaurs relatively speaking right and um you know the the cool thing though you know never in history of capitalism right has a trillion dollar tech outcome occurred outside of the u.s and china and you know of course i can't speak for pavel but certainly what but you but could happen that this is it you know i mean you know telegram ton um and and and digital assets right um so so this is exciting right as also in terms of the the yeah this is the the scale and and and sort of impact that this can have on on the free world i mean fascinating manny i can see why you you gave up some of your very valuable time to join the foundation because if you get this right it's a big thing it's a very big thing it's a huge opportunity fascinating and i can't wait to see where you get to with this journey because um i think all eyes are on it yeah well thank you so much for giving me such a distinguished audience you know great fan of your show and um you know i hope we're entering the banana zone uh so we all do my friend our hopes and dreams are in that fucking banana you know the the path to greatness is never straight right and it's about you know not about you know the cards you're being dealt but how you play the hand and and yeah hopefully we're going to play our hand really well.

1:07:45But look, we need all the help we can get. So please, thank you for giving us a platform. I'm happy to do this again in a couple of months' time. Of course, Ton is open for business, coming to the US, and we're open for partnerships. And we want the industry to win, right? And to put freedom into orbit. So that's why we're doing this. I really appreciate the time. Fantastic. Well, good luck with everything. Yeah, likewise. All the best, bro. Take care. So I thought that was fascinating. You know, I've been thinking for a long time that the crypto land and fiat world and that crypto land is this new frontier emerging market that's growing, that's broken up into different nation states, whether it's Ethereum, whether it's Bitcoin, etc.

1:08:28And Manny's actually thinking in the same way with that same framework of understanding. And really what he's thinking now is like, can Helegram and Ton be like M-Pesa in Kenya? Fascinating way of thinking about it. And look, you know, what's great about Manny is, A, he's obviously a lovely person, very engaging, very smart and thoughtful, but also very, he has a lot of humility with it as well. He understands the job at hand. So let's see where he goes on his journey to build out another network nation state.

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