Telegram founder Pavel Durov said Jonathan He, who won a gold medal and finished seventh overall at IOI 2026, sold his Algorithm Cup for 15,000 Grams, valuing the transaction at roughly $20,000. The collectible was among a limited set distributed to medal-winning young programmers after the competition in Tashkent, Uzbekistan.
Durov said the sum was meaningful for someone still at school and suggested it could become seed money for future projects. He drew a comparison with his own early entrepreneurial experience, saying $20,000 had been enough for him to launch his first company two decades ago.
He’s result at the Olympiad is independently confirmed by the competition’s official statistics. The 2026 event, held from August 9 to 16, brought together 375 contestants from 92 participating members. He scored 436.15 points across six programming tasks, placing seventh in the world and earning one of 31 gold medals awarded.
He was also the highest-ranked contestant representing the United States. Official US computing-olympiad records list him as a 2026 finalist from Adlai E. Stevenson High School in Illinois, placing him among the students selected for the national training process that determines the country’s IOI team.
Telegram announced before the competition that it planned to give Algorithm Cups to medal winners as exclusive digital collectibles. Durov initially said 235 winners would receive cups worth at least $117,000 in aggregate, based on guaranteed minimum values attached to the awards.
After the Olympiad ended, Durov said organisers were distributing 188 Algorithm Cups. He described them, along with 220 Intelligence Cups prepared for winners of the International Olympiad in Artificial Intelligence, as the only digital collectibles Telegram had issued during 2026.
The company had guaranteed a minimum buyback price of $1,000 for gold cups, while saying scarcity could lead to higher prices on secondary markets. He’s reported sale, at about 20 times that guaranteed floor, provides an early example of that possibility, although a single transaction does not establish a broader market value for the collection.
Telegram’s collectible gifts form part of a wider system that allows limited digital gifts to be upgraded and traded. The company began introducing gifts in 2024, with some limited editions later convertible into blockchain-based collectibles. Durov has since promoted auctions and secondary trading around scarce items distributed or sold through the messaging platform.
The Algorithm Cups were tied specifically to competitive programming achievement rather than offered as a conventional retail release. IOI describes itself as one of the international science olympiads and aims to identify and bring together highly talented school students in informatics and computing.
The Tashkent competition involved two contest days, with three algorithmic problems on each day. China’s Qiwen Xu topped the individual standings with 498.27 points, followed by Vladislav Zhiganov and China’s Shenghao Zhao. He finished behind competitors from China, Russia, Japan, Kazakhstan and Poland, and ahead of Po-Ting Li of Taiwan.
Durov has repeatedly linked Telegram’s support for the Olympiad to the company’s engineering culture, noting that several members of its team had themselves won medals in international programming competitions. At the start of IOI 2026, he said the company wanted to support what he called the best young programmers in the world.
The result also underscores the difference between Telegram’s guaranteed floor and prices reached voluntarily between users. Telegram did not announce a fixed market price for the cups, and Durov had warned from the outset that limited supply could make individual pieces worth considerably more. The eventual number of Algorithm Cups was lower than the preliminary figure announced before the competition, further limiting supply. Their value, however, remains dependent on buyer demand rather than medal status alone on secondary markets.
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