The world's largest social platform Telegram has a major update: Your GPU can now mine TON.

Yesterday, Telegram founder Pavel Durov tweeted to announce that their decentralized privacy computing network, Cocoon, has officially launched.

The Cocoon network consists of 3 parts:

Client: Initiates work requests to the agent and pays the agent upon request completion.

Agent: Routes work requests to work nodes. The agent, protected by TEE, will select an appropriate node based on the device model, load, and reputation of the work node, and will transfer the fee collected from the client to the node, which will also deduct a certain commission. Telegram plans to allow anyone to run their own agent in the future, making the Cocoon network fully decentralized.

Work Node: Executes AI inference requests in a TEE-protected virtual machine and is paid by the agent the fee from the client upon completion of the execution.

In other words, anyone can become a work node with their GPU to earn $TON. Cocoon enables GPU owners to contribute AI computing power to the decentralized network on TON by running the Cocoon protocol stack on a TEE-supported GPU server, providing private, verifiable AI model execution, and transparently receiving $TON payment for each processed request.

Pavel Durov stated that some AI-related features of Telegram, such as message translation, are already partially supported by Cocoon. He also mentioned Telegram's in-app features like speech-to-text and summarization, indicating that Cocoon initially lacks practical applications and believes that Telegram mini-programs will bring more demand for the Cocoon network in the future.

Compared to the previously hyped Telegram gift NFT in the crypto community, Cocoon is more like a decentralized AI computing network built by Telegram integrating blockchain and $TON as a payment method, stemming from the functional requirements within Telegram, with limited hype potential as it is unlikely to issue a coin. However, this project may reflect a long-term trend where there is increasing attention to the privacy concerns of exposing data directly to centralized AI giants when using AI. In the crypto community, we have seen more and more projects in the privacy track advocating for "protecting data sovereignty." (Related Read: 12 New Projects, an Overview of the Privacy Projects Officially Recognized by Solana)

Currently, the total TVL of the Cocoon Network has reached around 4487 TON, with 30 working nodes, 18 delegates, and 12 clients. This data is from just over 1 day since its official launch, still very early.

There is practical application demand supported by Telegram's built-in features and TON incentives. However, due to the presence of TON incentives, the expectation of coin issuance has also been reduced. Whether the Cocoon Network can follow a development pace different from that of typical cryptocurrency projects in the industry remains to be seen and will require time to validate.

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