Pavel Durov

But it was not easy to assemble a team of artists slash artists, artists slash engineers, I would say, that are able to do something like this.

This is a unique form of art.

And this allowed us to do a revolution in stickers, then another revolution in animated emoji that you can add into messages, custom animated emoji.

I don't think anybody did that.

I think Telegram is still the only one allowing users to do that because you can include a hundred of animated emoji in a message and they will be animated and they will be moving and your device won't crash.

It's probably unnecessary and crazy, but we think somewhere in this intersection of art and engineering, true quality is created.

And then, of course, more recently, we expanded into what we call Telegram Gifts, which are essentially blockchain-based collectibles that you can demonstrate on your Telegram profile so that they get social relevance, but you can also use them to congratulate your friends and close the one with their birthdays and other holidays.

And that was received extremely well.

Yes, we have a lot of features like that when we use this art to allow people to express themselves

And most people don't even know about these features.

I didn't know about it.

The other application of the same technology is reactions on Telegram because we made it a goal

to make sure that people feel joy when they just send you a like.

Something so trivial as just adding a like to a message should be an action that you want to perform again and again and again.

So in 2013, when we were launching Telegram,

we were aware of the serious issue with privacy that Edward Snowden made very clear.

And we thought, yes, we're designing this product in a way that is already extremely secure, but we want to make sure that not even we can access user messages.

And we understood very clearly that

a bunch of people who were born in Russia don't necessarily inspire trust.

So that's why we made Telegram open source.