Telegram CEO Pavel Durov Uses Bitcoin to Circumvent Russian Sanctions
Popular messaging app Telegram has recently locked horns with the Russian officials in its own home country over some privacy issue. Last week, the Russian court ordered a ban on Telegram after the company refused to share encryption keys with the state’s intelligence service in order to decrypt messages.
After the St. Petersburg attack that took place in April 2017, the investigative officials said they need to get access to messages to check and prevent any such attacks in the future. However, Telegram has refused to provide them saying that doing so would violate their privacy concerns.
After the ban finally went into effect this week, Telegram is now considering the use of Bitcoins in order to circumvent these sanctions. On Tuesday, Telegram founder Pavel Durov said that he will provide Bitcoin grants to organizations and groups operating VPNs and other proxy services who will help to bypass the nationwide ban.
Drove told his Telegram users that “To support internet freedoms in Russia and elsewhere I started giving out bitcoin grants to individuals and companies who run socks5 proxies and VPN. I am happy to donate millions of dollars this year to this cause, and hope that other people will follow. I called this Digital Resistance – a decentralized movement standing for digital freedoms and progress globally.”
Moreover, Alexander Zharov, head of the Russian watchdog organization Roskomnadzor has gone even further in implementing the ban by choking 18 sub-network and several IP addresses which even belong to popular tech giants like Microsoft, Google and Amazon, reported Reuters.
Zharov said that Telegram is widely used the app by terrorist organizations to “coordinate attacks” in Russia and even its neighbours. He said: “We have currently informed both companies that a significant number of IP addresses located in the clouds of these two services have fallen under the block due to the court ruling.”
Durov on his Telegram channel also said: “For the last 24 hours Telegram has been under a ban by internet providers in Russia. The reason is our refusal to provide encryption keys to Russian security agencies. For us, this was an easy decision. We promised our users 100% privacy and would rather cease to exist than violate this promise.”
Telegram said that they have not witnessed a noticeable decrease in the user engagement ever since the ban went into effect, however, with the ban extending on other IP addresses it might not be the same case.
Russia currently contributes 7 percent of the user for Telegram. Durov called this ban to be absolutely “unconstitutional” and further added that privacy is more important than any other numbers.
He added: “Even if we lose the entire [Russian market], Telegram’s organic growth in other regions will compensate for this loss within a couple months. However, it is important for me personally to make sure we do everything we can for our Russian users.”