Durov was given a telegram nickname for 8 million

Telegram founder Pavel Durov said that he was given a nickname in the messenger. The crypto businessman who made such a gift paid more than eight million rubles for it.

The username @pavel belonged to technical blogger Pavel Fedorov for nine years - he was the first to register under it in Telegram. However, a week ago, Fedorov put up this nickname on the Fragment auction platform, which was created specifically for buying and selling nicknames in the messenger.

“After a fierce bidding war, crypto entrepreneur @founder, who owns @crypto and many other Telegram handles, won the auction. Surprisingly, today @founder gave me the name @pavel,” writes Durov. He has already assigned the username to his official channel Du Rove's Channel.

Trading for the nickname was conducted in cryptocurrency. The sale price was 15 thousand TON or more than 80 thousand dollars. According to Durov, over the past 18 months, usernames and anonymous telegram numbers have been sold on the Fragment platform for $350 million - that’s about 34 billion rubles. Durov launched the nickname trading project at the end of October 2022.

“The newest versions of Telegram allow you to see when and for what amount a username was sold. To check this, you can go to my channel profile and click on @pavel or @snow,” said Durov.

He also noted that he bought the username @paul for 10 thousand TON so that no one else would give him such generous gifts.

Last week it became known that Pavel Durov gave an interview to American TV presenter Tucker Carlson. The hour-long recording was published on the YouTube channel of a journalist who previously interviewed Vladimir Putin.

To receive the main news faster, subscribe to our telegram and Twitter .