Messaging app Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov says he invested in Bitcoin when the cryptocurrency was in its infancy and has since used his holdings to fund his lifestyle.

“I was a big believer in Bitcoin since more or less the start of it. I got to buy my first few thousand Bitcoin in 2013, and I didn’t care much,” the Russian tech entrepreneur said on Lex Fridman’s podcast on Tuesday.

He added that he bought at the “local maximum,” which was around $700 per BTC, and “I just threw a couple of million there.”

A few people ridiculed him when the price went down after Bitcoin (BTC) tanked below $200 in the bear market that followed, but he told them, “I don’t care.”

“I’m not going to sell it. I believe in this thing. I think this is the way money should work. Nobody can confiscate your Bitcoin from you. Nobody can censor you for political reasons.”

Bitcoin helps Durov “stay afloat” 

Durov said that he has used his Bitcoin investment to fund his lifestyle. “Some people think if I’m able to rent nice locations or fly private, it’s because I somehow extract money from Telegram,” he said. 

“Like I said, Telegram is a money-losing operation for me personally. Bitcoin is something that allowed me to stay afloat.”

He predicted that “it will come to a point when Bitcoin is worth $1 million” due to governments “printing money like no tomorrow.”

“Nobody’s printing Bitcoin,” he said, adding that it has predictable inflation and will stop being made at a certain point. “Bitcoin is here to stay. All the fiat currencies remain to be seen.”

Durov on TON

Durov, who was arrested a year ago in France and charged with facilitating crimes committed by Telegram users, also discussed the Telegram Open Network, which it developed in 2018 and 2019 to provide a blockchain for the messenger service. 

Related: French officials pressured Telegram to censor Moldova election posts: Durov

He added that Bitcoin and Ether (ETH) were “not scalable enough to cope with the load that our hundreds of millions of users would create.”

The key innovation was inherent scalability through “shardchains,” he said. However, despite successfully developing the technology, Telegram couldn’t launch it due to regulatory restrictions in the US. 

The project, now called The Open Network, is deeply embedded in the Telegram ecosystem and has gained momentum for non-fungible tokens (NFTs). 

“TON has become, I think, the largest or the second largest blockchain in terms of daily NFT trading volumes.” 

The network’s native token, Toncoin (TON), hit an all-time high of $8.25 in mid-2024 but has since fallen more than 67% from that level. 

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