CANTO II: VKONTAKTE: THE FIRST KINGDOM

Telegram was born in 2013, operated by a centralized organization. Its secret chats received end-to-end encryption; channels and ordinary cloud chats followed another model. Veles found paths between those doors and learned which guards protected each one. The messenger preceded TON and had its own architecture.

VKontakte, literally "In Contact", launches in the space that Facebook forgot: the Russian-speaking internet, the post-Soviet countries, the people who were born in an empire that spied on everything and have no reason to trust centralized platforms. The network grows with the speed of something that finally answers a real need. By 2008, it has a million users. By 2010, five million. By 2012, fifty million. It is the largest social network in Eastern Europe, and it is Russian.

But VKontakte is not just technically superior, it is ideologically different. It is built on the principle that users should own their data, that privacy should be real, that the platform should not be a spying apparatus disguised as a service. Durov implements features that Facebook fights against: users control their own privacy settings, data is encrypted, the platform is not designed to extract your relationships and sell them to advertisers.

The service grew before an integrated blockchain economy existed. Telegram Premium would launch in 2022. TON did not fund Telegram in 2013 either: the blockchain project would be presented years later. The audience preceded these tools and helps explain why the Durov brothers began imagining an economic layer.

By 2011, VKontakte has become the largest social network in Russia, with over eighty million users. But Pavel Durov has also become a man marked for destruction. The empire does not tolerate independent power, does not tolerate tools of communication that it cannot control, does not tolerate people who say no. The first kingdom of Veles is about to fall, but from its ruins something greater will be born.