Telegram CEO Pavel Durov took to the stage at Blockchain Life 2025 in Dubai on Wednesday to announce Cocoon, a decentralized AI compute network built on The Open Network (TON) blockchain that will pay GPU owners in Toncoin for powering private AI inference.
The network, formally called the Confidential Compute Open Network, will launch in November with Telegram as its first major customer. Applications for GPU providers and developers opened immediately following the announcement.
Cocoon creates a marketplace where individuals contribute computing power through their graphics processing units and receive TON cryptocurrency in exchange. On the other side, developers gain access to low-cost AI infrastructure that processes queries without exposing user data to centralized providers.
This decentralized AI infrastructure is billed as a rival against the monopoly that Big Tech corporations like Amazon’s AWS and Microsoft Azure have. In fact, Durov positioned the project as a response to eroding digital freedoms. Both Telegram and the TON blockchain were also conceived with this privacy-first approach in mind.
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