There's a strange story making noise in the Telegram gifts community right now.

Quick context on how it works: you buy a gift from a brand new collection (a non-unique gift), and after a while — once Telegram's design team finishes it — they let you convert it into an NFT for a certain amount of Stars. That's the "craft" step: it gets a unique number and later becomes mintable too. And it's not cheap — in recent collections, the very first craft for number 1 has gone as high as 1 million Stars.

Now users have noticed that certain rare, specific numbers — like DurovsGlasses-2222 — simply won't craft, no matter how many times you try.

The strange part: 2221 and 2223 craft just fine and stay fully visible inside Telegram afterward, but 2222 neither crafts nor even shows up. Without ever being crafted, it seems to have been skipped by the system entirely and then minted manually by a insider employee.

It gets more curious — some of these exact special numbers are held by recurring owners who appear to be Telegram staff themselves. No surprise the community is pushing back.

Let's assume there was no intent at all. Even then, this could be a systemic bug that an attacker exploited. But that assumption doesn't reduce Telegram's responsibility one bit — what's in question here is the fairness of gift distribution, and identifying it, fixing it, and maybe even disclosing it publicly is entirely Telegram's job.

And this sits in direct contradiction with the exact image Telegram keeps advertising: a secure, transparent messenger. The result is clear — what little trust the community had left is getting chipped away every day, and the situation keeps getting more disheartening.