The new project, dubbed Cocoon, aims to give users access to AI tools without surrendering their data to centralized providers.
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:
