Telegram’s gloves are off. In what might be the pettiest—and most brilliant—creator contest of the year, the messaging app is offering up to $50,000 in prizes to whoever can drag WhatsApp the hardest… with style.
Telegram Isn’t Playing Nice Anymore
This isn’t satire. Through his official channel, Paul Durov, founder and CEO of Telegram, launched a contest inviting creators to highlight how Telegram is years ahead of WhatsApp. Durov’s team has even published a list of 30 features Telegram introduced first, all of which WhatsApp allegedly copied later. The features range from cloud storage to bots, usernames, animated stickers, and multi-device support.
“It’s time to wake WhatsApp users up,” Durov said. “They’re trapped in the past, using watered-down versions of innovations Telegram pioneered long ago.”
Telegram’s claims hold water, at least in terms of who got there first. It’s true that Telegram rolled out many features before WhatsApp did. But whether WhatsApp copied Telegram is harder to prove. These features aren’t protected by patents, and in tech, overlap is inevitable.
Developers borrow ideas all the time; that’s how trends form. Some iOS features were Android-first. Grok’s Studio is remarkably similar to ChatGPT’s Canvas. Yet, you don’t see OpenAI and Google throwing tantrums over it. So why is Pavel Durov?
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This contest didn’t just come out of nowhere. The gloves came off after Durov revealed that WhatsApp had allegedly launched a smear campaign against Telegram earlier this month. In a post titled “They’ve Started Paying for Anti-Telegram Smears,” he claimed Meta was funneling money to Western media and Telegram influencers to tarnish Telegram’s image.
“No more playing nice,” Durov added. “We’ve caught WhatsApp running smear PR campaigns, so it’s only fair we hit back.”
An example of this is WhatsApp buying ad space in Telegram channels. One such post, spotted on a Russian Apple news channel, ran with this translated headline:
Users have been complaining more and more about Telegram: it’s flooded with ads, scams, paid features, and it even overheats devices. Now it’s worth asking: is WhatsApp really that bad?
Missed It? The Internet Didn’t
Entries were due by May 27 at 23:59 Dubai time, but the impact is still rolling. Telegram encouraged creators to share their videos with the hashtag #TelegramYearsAhead, and now YouTube Shorts is flooded with these videos.
Durov also encouraged the use of AI, and it shows. Most videos are low-effort memes, stitched together in familiar TikTok formats (yay for more AI slop running rampant on the internet).
Some creators took it to the next level. One user, AL Robin, made an entire short film for the contest, portraying Telegram as a savvy blue cat and WhatsApp as a clueless green copycat. In the video, WhatsApp mimics everything Telegram does, only to fail spectacularly every time.
Quality aside, the message is loud and clear. Telegram has effectively weaponized its user base into a decentralized PR strike force. Whether these meme-driven videos will actually convince anyone to switch platforms is another question.
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The Cold War Heats Up
The rivalry between Telegram and WhatsApp is old news, but this contest has escalated it. Telegram sees itself as the innovator and disruptor, while WhatsApp is painted as the slow-moving giant, living off legacy users and borrowed ideas.
Whether users care about who launched animated stickers first is debatable. But in the messenger cold war, Telegram just made the loudest move yet, and it’s betting $50,000 that people will listen.
