Pavel Durov Earns 95.8 Million Rubles from NFT Bricks

On April 1, an NFT gift in the form of a brick appeared on the Telegram messenger. All 7,000 units were sold out within 34 minutes.

The price of one brick was 5000 Telegram Stars (13,690 rubles at the time of writing). Thus, Pavel Durov, as the sole owner of the messenger, earned over 95.8 million rubles from the April Fool’s token.

The first NFT gifts on the TON blockchain appeared on Telegram at the end of 2022. The TON Gifts service was launched by a team of independent developers.

On October 5, 2024, Telegram added a feature for sending gifts using its internal currency.

Earlier in the summer of 2024, the messenger underwent a major update, launching a Web3 browser, an app store, and allowing users to gift Telegram Stars to contacts.