Pavel Durov, the founder of Telegram, landed his private jet at Le Bourget airport in France and was immediately arrested.

For years, we believed that Telegram was untouchable. We thought the app was a fortress.

But within a month of his arrest, the fortress lowered its drawbridge. By September 2024, Telegram updated its privacy policy.

The new terms were clear: if they receive a valid legal request regarding criminal activities, they will have to disclose your IP address and phone number, which I kinda agree is necessary sometimes, but not always. And we know that it will always be a legal request from the government, but not necessarily valid.

Let’s think about it.

For a decade, Telegram’s selling point was that it would rather die than give up user data. But it turns out, the ultimate firewall wasn’t the code. It was the CEO. And CEOs can be arrested.

I don’t mean to talk badly about Telegram. It’s a great app with no doubt, and I love it from the bottom of my heart. But I feel something could be better.

This event forced me to dig deep into how Telegram actually works, and why, as a Web3 tech person, I believe it is a brilliant intermediary solution.

But not the final destination.

To understand why Telegram is so hard to crack, we have to look at the architecture designed by Pavel’s brother, Nikolai Durov.

Nikolai is a legitimate math genius (two PhDs and International Math Olympiad gold medals). He understood that in the physical world, you can’t fight a government with just encryption.

You have to fight them with bureaucracy.

Telegram uses a technique I would call jurisdictional sharding.

When you send a message on Telegram (using the default Cloud Chat), the data is encrypted.

But the trick here is: the decryption keys are not stored in one place.

For example, your chat logs are in a server in the Netherlands. The key to unlock them is split into three parts: one is in Singapore, one is in Russia, and one is in the British Virgin Islands.

For the FBI (or any agency) to legally force Telegram to give up the content of your chats, they would need court orders from all those jurisdictions simultaneously.

They essentially used global geopolitical friction as a security feature. They bet on the fact that the US, Russia, and Europe would never agree on anything long enough to sign a joint subpoena.

It is brilliant. It is “Geopolitical Decentralization.”

However, there is a flaw.

I realized this flaw a few years ago while attending a Solana developer meetup event at Metacamp in Singapore.

I was listening to a presentation by a team from Web3Auth. They were explaining how they handle user logins for crypto wallets without making users write down seed phrases.

They also used the word “Sharding.” They also talked about splitting keys.

But as I listened, I realized there is a massive difference between how Web2 companies (even rebellious ones like Telegram) handle shards and how Web3 handles them.

Telegram uses Custodial Sharding. Even though the keys are in different countries, Telegram owns all the servers. If the pressure is high enough, like the CEO being threatened with 20 years in a French prison, the company can technically instruct its admins in Singapore, Russia, and the BVI to cooperate. They have the technical ability to reassemble the key because they hold all the pieces.

Web3 uses Non-Custodial Sharding. The technology presented by Web3Auth is based on MPC (Multi-Party Computation).

In this model, the key is generated in pieces and distributed to different entities that do not trust each other.

And here’s the kicker: The server never sees the full key.

When you log in, the cryptographic signature is constructed mathematically without the shards ever meeting in a central database.

Even if the FBI raided the Web3Auth headquarters or arrested their CEO, it wouldn’t matter. The company simply has no way to give up its private key. They only hold a fragment of it. Without the piece on your phone, their piece is mathematically useless junk data.

This brings us to the core philosophy of why we build on-chain.

Telegram trusts friction. It relies on the inefficiency of international law. It relies on the bravery of its founder.

It works... until the friction is removed (by an arrest) or the founder breaks. Though I still believe in their integrity.

Web3 trusts Math. It relies on Threshold Cryptography. It doesn’t matter if the founder is brave or cowardly. It doesn’t matter if the laws change. The math remains the same.

Don’t get me wrong. I still use Telegram every day. The “Jurisdictional Sharding” model is lightyears ahead of Facebook or Google, who store your data in centralized US servers that are essentially open books for the NSA.

Telegram is the perfect Web 2.5 bridge. It creates privacy by making it legally expensive to violate it.

But if we want true sovereignty, the kind that cannot be coerced by a judge in Paris or a regulator in Washington, we need to move from geopolitical sharding to sovereign sharding.

We need to stop relying on “Please don’t look at my data” and start building systems where “You can’t look at my data. Like, there’s no way.”

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