Original｜Odaily Planet Daily (@OdailyChina)
Author: Wenser (@wenser2010)
The aftermath of the arrest of Telegram founder Pavel Durov continues. Following the news mentioned in yesterday's article "Telegram founder arrested, more than half of funds withdrawn, will the TON ecosystem suffer a devastating blow?", the latest development of the incident is that the French authorities have confirmed the detention of Pavel Durov and said that they will issue an official statement later. What will await this 39-year-old tech tycoon with a net worth of $15.5 billion? The market is paying close attention.
Odaily Planet Daily will sort out and summarize the latest developments of the incident in this article.
Mixed reactions: Crypto industry generally supports Pavel Durov
More than 24 hours after Pavel Durov was arrested, Russian officials, cryptocurrency industry professionals, Telegram platform projects, TON ecosystem officials and projects who have close ties with Telegram and TON ecosystem continued to speak out. The following are the specific reactions of all parties:
Politicians: US and Russian officials have clear positions
According to Reuters, Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov became a French citizen in August 2021. He moved Telegram to Dubai in 2017 and has lived there ever since. According to French media reports, he has also obtained UAE citizenship, in addition to being a citizen of the Caribbean twin island nation of Saint Kitts and Nevis.
Previously, Western officials said in interviews that Telegram is a tool of Russian military intelligence agencies to recruit personnel in Europe to carry out sabotage activities, including attempts to disrupt and monitor NATO's transportation lines used to supply Ukraine. A senior European security official said that Telegram has become Russia's main platform for spreading false information in Europe and Ukraine. Jackson Hinkle, an independent political commentator in the United States, wrote that an anti-Israel hacker had previously stolen billions of bytes of sensitive Israeli data and published confidential information on Telegram, and Telegram rejected Israel's request to censor it.
As Mizulina, head of the Russian Secure Internet Alliance, believes, the power behind Pavel Durov's arrest in France is the United States, which can also be indirectly confirmed by Pavel Durov's previous remarks in The Tucker Carlson Interview: "The FBI and other security agencies want to... better control Telegram."
In contrast, Russian officials are "trying to save" and "regretting" -
Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said it was a miscalculation for Telegram CEO Pavel Durov to flee Russia thinking he would never have to work with security services abroad. Medvedev, who frequently used Telegram to criticize the West, said Durov wanted to be a "brilliant 'world citizen' and live a good life without a homeland." "He miscalculated," Medvedev said. "To all our common enemies he is Russian -- and therefore unpredictable and dangerous." Russia's Foreign Ministry said it had sent a note to Paris requesting a meeting with Durov, even though he already holds French citizenship.
Additionally, Russian officials expressed "anger" over the arrest of Pavel Durov, with some Russian officials calling the arrest an indirect hostile act against Russia.
It is worth mentioning that Pavel Durov's experience has also been supported by people with similar experiences: Edward Snowden, the whistleblower of the "Prism Gate", wrote that "the arrest of Telegram CEO Pavel Durov is a violation of basic human rights such as freedom of expression and the right to association."
Robert Kennedy Jr., an American politician who just withdrew from the US presidential election, also made a rare statement on this, saying, "The arrest of Pavel Durov highlights the critical importance of maintaining platforms committed to free speech and privacy.
People in the cryptocurrency industry: Buy TON with real money and show your support to the end
The reactions of people in the cryptocurrency industry to Pavel Durov’s arrest may make us understand the meaning of the saying “a friend in need is a friend indeed.”
Animoca Brands co-founder Yat Siu wrote on the matter: "In this fight for freedom, we are committed to supporting our friends, the TON community. Decentralization is the solution to resist censorship and maintain our freedom. #FREEDUROV. Decentralization builds resilience by eliminating single points of failure, enhancing fault tolerance, and ensuring freedom through censorship resistance. TON is the decentralized solution for the Telegram ecosystem to ensure its future. #FreePavel."
DWF Labs co-founder Andrei Grachev said in a post that he had purchased about $500,000 worth of TON on the open market and would keep them on the chain until Telegram founder Pavel Durov was released. He added: "This does not constitute financial advice, I just want to support anti-censorship and decentralized technology."
NFT and Meme coin project Memeland announced that it has used team treasury funds to buy $1 million worth of TON on the open market and will hold it until Durov is released.
Justin Sun, the founder of TRON, who has always been sensitive to hot topics in the crypto industry, also spoke out publicly: "I am concerned about the fate of Telegram founder Pavel Durov. Regardless of the judicial outcome, Telegram is vital to the communication freedom and privacy of billions of people. I hope that Durov can regain his freedom as soon as possible in a legal manner and ensure that user rights are protected in a compliant manner. In addition, the cryptocurrency industry should unite and organize a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) called#FreePavelto help Durov gain his freedom legally." Finally, he promised that he would donate $1 million if the DAO was created in a decentralized manner and received sufficient community support.
In addition, some people in the encryption industry have expressed their views on this from the perspective of industry development and product development.
Stani Kulechov, founder of Aave and Lens Protocol, wrote, “In light of the recent arrest of Telegram CEO Pavel Durov, I have been reflecting on how to build a ‘resilient approach’ that can uphold various rights, even when these rights (such as free speech and content review) may create conflicting situations. Social networks should be built with resilience as a focus.”
Paradigm co-founder Matt Huang believes that this means the best time to integrate Telegram groups into the Farcaster ecosystem may have arrived; Ethereum co-founder Vitalik refuted this, saying: "The timing for Farcaster to integrate Telegram groups is not yet ripe, and an end-to-end encrypted communication system must be established first."
XEX Chinese channel commented that "Pavel Durov's arrest will not affect the normal operation of Telegram. Similarly, TON, as a decentralized community, backed by Telegram's 800 million users, will not be greatly affected." It is optimistic about the subsequent development of Telegram and TON ecosystem.
Telegram and TON ecological projects: Some vowed to fight to the end, while others stressed that it would not affect the operation of their own projects
TON’s official Twitter account added the Resistance Dog logo, which was drawn and named by the founder of Telegram in 2018, to its profile picture, and responded to the call of TON Society, the official community of the TON ecosystem, calling on more people to take the following actions to show their support for Pavel Durov: 1) Share the post and use the#FREEDUROVtag; 2) Add the [FREE] emoji to the username; 3) Change the profile picture to Resistance Dog.
Subsequently, the TON community responded enthusiastically. The TON community posted in the official TG channel: "We stand on the same front with Pavel Durov (founder of Telegram). In order to support the Digital Resistance, we are updating the Toncoin logo and avatar in the TON community channel and changing it to the global symbol of the Digital Resistance Movement - 'Resistance Dog'. Pavel Durov launched this movement in the struggle to maintain the privacy of Telegram users and protect freedom of speech."
The official page of the well-known exchange Binance shows that the TON token logo has also been updated to Resistance Dog.
Of course, compared to the TON ecosystem, which has a deeper binding relationship with Telegram, some projects that rely on the Telegram platform first emphasize that "their own operations are not affected by Telegram."
The official of Telegram Bot project Banana Gun stated, “The situation about the founder of Telegram has raised some questions in our chat and how this affects Banana Gun. It is important to note that our Bot is safe to use. Banana Gun wants to assure users that Banana Gun is far more than a Telegram Bot. In fact, Banana Gun is actually a completely customized backend system. While this backend currently provides support for its Telegram frontend, it will soon become the engine for many other frontends as well. For example, Banana Gun is developing an API that third parties can integrate and use, and a web application has also entered the final stage. Our vision for Banana Gun prompted us to redesign the entire backend in the first half of 2024, turning it into a modular and flexible trading tool. We are more confident than ever that this investment will bring huge returns.”
Telegram also issued a statement regarding the arrest of Pavel Durov:
Telegram complies with EU law, including the Digital Services Act, and its platform audits meet industry standards and are continuously improved;
Telegram CEO Pavel Durov has nothing to hide and travels frequently in Europe;
It is absurd to claim that a platform or its owners are responsible for abuse on the platform;
Nearly one billion users around the world use Telegram as a means of communication and an important source of information;
The team is waiting for this matter to be resolved quickly.
However, judging from the feedback from the prediction market, the possibility of this matter being resolved in a short period of time is low: the Polymarket platform shows that the current prediction of the probability of Telegram founder Pavel Durov being released in August has dropped from 50% when it was first created last Sunday to 29%, affected by the previous news that the French authorities and judicial procedures will place Pavel Durov in pretrial detention.
PolyMarket forecast activity interface
Summary: Pavel Durov's fate depends on the French authorities
According to a post on the X platform by Viktor, head of the TON Society community, some local residents in Moscow, Russia have launched a "paper plane protest". People chose to throw paper planes at the French Embassy in Russia to express their support for the Telegram platform and Pavel Durov in a relatively peaceful way.
It is worth mentioning that Pavel Durov celebrated the 11th anniversary of the platform on his personal Telegram channel on August 14, and mentioned: "In 1995, when I was 11 years old, I made a promise to myself to become smarter, stronger and freer every day. Today Telegram is 11 years old and it is ready to make the same promise. Every day, Telegram should become: smarter (providing users with more features); more powerful (more popular among users); freer (more independent and self-sufficient). Happy birthday, Telegram! P.S. Just 2 weeks after the last major Telegram update, we released new features today - a new type of channel and 3 new ways to support content creators. Enjoy it!"
Pavel Durov channel speech
Pavel Durov might not have expected at that time that 11 days later, the "freedom" that he most desired and tried hard to defend would become the "biggest trap" he encountered after arriving in France.
Now, Pavel Durov’s subsequent fate will still be decided by the French authorities. In addition to taking practical actions to support Pavel Durov and the TON ecosystem, we will continue to track the latest developments of the incident.
