Pavel Durov, co-founder of the messaging application Telegram, has disclosed a new decentralized AI network to be built atop The Open Network (TON), an independent layer-1 blockchain associated with Telegram.
Durov took the stage at the Blockchain Life 2025 forum in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, to announce the Confidential Compute Open Network, or Cocoon, created to give users access to AI-driven features without sacrificing data privacy to centralized AI providers.
According to Durov, users can make the processing power from their graphics processing units (GPUs) available to the network, in exchange for receiving Toncoin (TON), the native token of TON. Durov also touched on why decentralized AI is needed for human freedom:
“Why is it important to do something this way as opposed to the centralized way that is sometimes more convenient? It is important, my friends, because the world has been moving towards a weird direction. For the last 20 years. We’ve been gradually losing our digital freedoms.”
Decentralizing AI models has become a widely discussed topic among AI and blockchain developers due to privacy risks and the potential for centralized service providers to censor or distort critical information in real time, without users realizing it.
Related: Telegram’s Durov: We’re ‘running out of time to save the free internet’
Centralized AI’s vulnerabilities illustrate blockchain’s potential
Centralizing artificial intelligence poses risks to user data privacy, including the risk of data breaches and hacks, according to several crypto and Web3 industry executives.
Storing vast quantities of user data on centralized servers makes the data an attractive target for hackers, David Holtzman, chief strategy officer of the Naoris decentralized security protocol, told Cointelegraph.
Centralized AI service providers could also shift algorithms behind the scenes or distort critical data in real-time to manipulate public opinion, some industry executives have warned.
Blockchain technology can help verify that data produced by AI remains tamper-proof by using a decentralized ledger to record the origin and chain of custody of data, producing an immutable and provable digital record onchain.
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