Who Will Replace the GOAT?

Who Will Replace the GOAT?

Note: This set of notes is about a faint signal from France regarding the country's approach to online crime. This short post is derived from our on-going reseearch into Telegram and the companies in its orbit. Remember, the statements in this essay are from my notes and should be viewed as working hypotheses. Verify before you trust any of my observations. These are ideas I captured as my team and I are working on "Post-Telegram Cyber Crime: The Agentic Era." Keep these disclaimers in mind as you review this document.

The French government distributed Stratégie nationale de cybersécurité on November 2, 2026. For a French citizen awaiting trial on charges of serious online criminal offenses, the document makes clear how the government will approach these types of cases.

Pavel Durov (the self-proclaimed GOAT of Russian entrepreneurs) has been awaiting resolution of a dozen online crimes he is accused of commiting. He was arrested as he deplaned his private jet in August 2024. He has been meeting with French authorities and his attorneys for about 26 months. In that time, Telegram has taken a couple of kidney punches; for example, the value of the GRAM crypto has fallen and technical glitches in the Telegram platform have frustrated users and developers. In addition, earlier this year he pulled the blockchain technology from the TON Foundation. Plus, Telegram is now responsible for the GRAM crypto and transaction validation. These moves have put the TON Foundation in a position of uncertainty.

As a Swiss non-profit foundation with a rental office in Zug, Switzerland, the charter for the not-for-profit mentioned management of blockchain technology and the crypto. With those legs of the digital footstool removed, it means that the TON Foundation may be viewed as problematic. So far, the Swiss regulators have been as quiet as Lausanne early on Sunday morning. There is a chance that the trains-run-on-time regulators could dig into the sand beneath the TON Foundation. (It operates from Dubai where there is quite a lot of sand based on my personal observation the land.)

The French Seem Focused

What happens if the French government implements its stratégie nationale? Quoting from the document, the government says in Pillar Three, page 16:

In French:

La France est déterminée à entraver l’expansion de cette cybermenace. Elle mobilisera l'ensemble des leviers d'action à sa disposition pour augmenter significativement le coût financier, humain et réputationnel pour ses adversaires potentiels qui pourraient nuire à son économie, à la stabilité de sa démocratie, ou à la sécurité des biens et des personnes sur son territoire, et pour les décourager de s'en prendre à la France et à ses partenaires.

And in English:

France is determined to halt the expansion of this cyber threat. It will mobilise all the levers at its disposal to significantly increase the financial, human and reputational cost for potential adversaries who could harm its economy, the stability of its democracy, or the security of property and people on its territory, and to discourage them from attacking France and its partners.

For a person in Pavel Durov's position, it is not clear what the French judiciary will do. A number of options are available to the officials:

1. Leave Pavel Durov dangling in the wind, pressuring him to become more cooperative with certain investigations in order to obtain more detailed Telegram user information
2. Put Pavel in one of the French prisons; for example, Fleury, limit his contact with the outside world, and make sure the non-conformist in him conforms to prison life. (Note: The number one cause of death in that overcrowded facility is suicide.)
3. Release him but [a] Assess a suitable financial penalty and [b] Impose a rigorous check in and monitoring regimen to help him follow the laws of France and the European Union.
4. Slap him on the wrist and hand him over to one of the other countries that have found him in violation of the laws of Australia, Belgium, and Russia. The GOAT would then be in the judicial wheels of another country.

The French are creative; therefore, I want to point out that these four options may not exhaust what the judicial process of France decides.

The Management Set Up of Telegram

Pavel Durov is the founder, president, and new product person at Telegram. The company employs some people, but there is no public listing of top management. Locating those who manage different functional units of the company yield a handful of names. Titles, job descriptions, and office location remain under wraps. There is no succession plan; there is no obvious number two; and there is no there there. In short, today's Telegram is the personification of the yip yap about Web3 business.

Three other characteristics of Pavel's approach to organizational structure management struck me as important:

1. The individuals performing jobs associated with vice president of marketing, director of engineering, CFO, and similar functional roles are not located in a single office. Staff are [a] Meeting in cafés in Saint Petersburg, Moscow, and other cities; [b] Working in the firm's office in Dubai, or [c] Home. Social media posts suggest that key people have resided in Israel, Singapore, or a van.
2. Some people allegedly working for Telegram have zero public profile; for example, Pavel Durov's maternal half brother Mikhail Petrov, who disappeared from public view six or seven years ago. Another examople is Marta Kudina, allegedly the chief financial officer who interacted or interacts with Vladimir Vedeneev, founder of Global Network Management. These people seem to be ghost executives connected in some way to Telegram and/or the TON Foundation.
3. Telegram is a poster child for the cross-jurisdictional, distributed, disaggregated digital enterprise. The company exists within Telegram, not a company my father would recognize. He worked at old-fashioned companies with titles, organization charts, and big buildings with his employer's name on them in large letters.

Who Could Run Telegram?

My team and I went through three years of notecards looking for the names of people who could step in and keep Telegram's lights on and the bills paid. None of these individuals has the Web3 sizzle that the GOAT himself has, but Telegram has been in maintenance mode since the August 2024 arrest. North Korean operators are not stealing GRAM tokens. These are worth less than $1.50 per token as I write this "frontier" look at the next president of Telegram.

Here's our preliminary and subjective list of individuals who could become the Telegram president pro tempore. My team and I will continue looking for individuals who take the GOAT's place in the digital stable so to speak.

Net Net

The future of Telegram is in the hands of the French judicial system. If France follows the hard line in its 2026 Stratégie white paper, the GOAT may be tethered either in a jail cell or to 24x7 surveillance. (His office in Dubai is in the same building as the French consulate.) Without a succession plan, someone will have to run the organization. Will a new president create a different Telegram, or will the office temp just keep the lights on, the bills paid, and the pace of innovation at a walking pace?

Stephen E Arnold, November 3, 2026