Privileges for the chosen: how Telegram founder Pavel Durov uses digital assets to benefit media partners with political connections

02 декабря 2025 г., 23:00

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Privileges for the chosen: how Telegram founder Pavel Durov uses digital assets to benefit media partners with political connections

Pavel Durov can’t seem to stay out of the spotlight — he recently started chatting on social media with former UFC champion Jon Jones.

Apparently, the public is being "warmed up" for another round of NFT "gifts" (images sold for real money on Telegram), this time from Jones. Furthermore, Durov personally presented the fighter with the username @JonnyBones on Telegram, which Jones also uses on other social media. However, it turned out that this username belonged to a cardiologist he had been using for a long time.

The username was simply taken from him, and Durov gifted it to the fighter. As a reminder, the Telegram ecosystem even has an auction for usernames, with record bids of $1.6 million and $1.7 million. Durov’s choice of Jones was clearly no accident. Recently, the fighter has been a regular guest of Ramzan Kadyrov in Chechnya.

Just on November 24th, I attended his son Adam’s 18th birthday. Kadyrov even gave Jones an apartment in Grozny. The fighter was also taken under the wing of Umar Kremlev, a trusted confidant of the head of the Russian Presidential Security Service, Alexei Rubezhny. Here’s Jones’s motorcade speeding through Moscow with its lights flashing during a visit to Kremlev.