FOGINT: What Do the Most Recent Telegram Function Enhancements Portend for 2025?

January 2, 2025

This is a report from the FOGINT research team.

For a company without a permanent office with staff who show up everyday, Telegram has been busy in December 2024. One good example is Telegram’s chopping up the video stream from its Gateway Conference held in early November 2024. The individual talks with their unique Telegram / TON Foundation quirkiness are available on YouTube at this link. One can mostly parse some speakers’ content using the Google caption function.

Also, a “real” news service has collected several other Telegram and its ecosystem announcement in “Telegram Rolls Out Third-Party Account Verification, Filters.” For those unfamiliar with Telegram, the service offered a verification process. That service remains, and “has now launched a new project to let already-verified third-party authorities, such as food quality regulators or educational consortiums, verify an account.” The article also points out that Telegram has added “filters” to the baked in search and retrieval service. FOGINT wants to point out that the search service is not very good. Retrieval remains spotty. The only way to find certain content is to monitor specific public and private groups. The content from these groups can then be downloaded or sucked from the service with a well-crafted script tuned to observe Telegram’s quite specific blocks on bulk downloading. According to the cited article, Telegram has added:

Emoji reactions
Sending gifts (this is a money generating angle)
Search filters for private chats, group chats, and channels.

The write up does not ask the question, “What is the direction these features suggest Telegram and its associated entities are heading in 2025?”

Here’s FOGINT’s take on the path Telegram is likely to follow:

Freeing Pavel will be a top priority
Amping up Telegram and the TON Foundation’s crypto activities. (Telegram is the platform for TON Foundation; the Foundation is the marketing and developer magnet for the TONcoin.)
Provide functions and services like third party verification to show the French judiciary and others that Telegram does have “real” users and can provide investigators with some useful information maybe.

But the big priority after the “Free Pavel” action is crypto; specifically, making the Telegram platform the hub for crypto gaming and possibly some allied services like automating the movement of crypto from one coin and wallet to other wallets and coins. Tie ups with the Ku Group and other organizations providing crypto alternatives to traditional and regulated financial systems are on board and rolling out integrated services at this time.

Stephen E Arnold, January 2, 2025

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under cryptocurrency, cybercrime, Fogint, News

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.