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. This network is 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 contributing their GPU power, users will receive Toncoin (TON), the native token of TON. Durov also touched on why decentralized AI is needed for human freedom:
“Why is it important to do something this way as opposed to the centralized way that is sometimes more convenient? It is important, my friends, because the world has been moving towards a weird direction. For the last 20 years. We've been gradually losing our digital freedoms.”
Decentralizing AI models has become a widely discussed topic among AI and blockchain developers. This is due to privacy risks and the potential for centralized service providers to censor or distort critical information in real-time, without users realizing it.
Centralized AI’s Vulnerabilities Illustrate Blockchain’s Potential
Centralizing artificial intelligence poses significant risks to user data privacy. These risks include the potential for data breaches and hacks, according to several executives in the crypto and Web3 industries.
Storing vast quantities of user data on centralized servers makes that data an attractive target for hackers, David Holtzman, chief strategy officer of the Naoris decentralized security protocol, told Cointelegraph.
Furthermore, centralized AI service providers could potentially shift algorithms behind the scenes or distort critical data in real-time. This manipulation could be used to influence public opinion, some industry executives have warned.
Blockchain technology offers a solution by helping to verify that data produced by AI remains tamper-proof. It achieves this by using a decentralized ledger to record the origin and chain of custody of data. This process produces an immutable and provable digital record onchain.