Who shares proxies on Telegram
Free proxies reach people through Telegram channels. We looked at 1,771 channels that share MTProto proxies and their neighbours that share VPN keys and V2Ray configs. Most are Persian, most have gone quiet, and the newest wave is Russian.
- 53.2% of proxy channels write in Persian, and 70.6% of V2Ray config channels do.
- Only one in five proxy channels (348 of 1,771) shares nothing but proxies; the rest also post VPN keys or V2Ray configs.
- 13.8% of proxy channels had posted in the 30 days before our snapshot. Persian ones were the most active (16.3%), Chinese ones the least (7.3%).
- 31.4% of Russian-language proxy and VPN channels were created after May 2024, against 14.7% of Persian ones. Among Russian proxy channels alone the share is 35%.
- 149 proxy channels have 100,000+ subscribers. The largest, Proxy MTProto, has 11.8M.
Three kinds of channel, mostly mixed
We grouped channels by their tags: channels that share MTProto proxies, channels that share VPN access and channels that share V2Ray or VLESS configs, a format widely used in Iran. The groups overlap heavily.
| Shares | Channels |
|---|---|
| VPN only | 1,337 |
| Proxy and VPN | 1,059 |
| Proxy only | 348 |
| Proxy, VPN and V2Ray | 327 |
| V2Ray and VPN | 165 |
| V2Ray only | 49 |
| Proxy and V2Ray | 37 |
The pure proxy channel is the exception. Subscribers want whatever gets through this week, so most channels post whichever tool works rather than sticking to one.
Languages
| Language | Proxy | VPN | V2Ray |
|---|---|---|---|
| Persian | 53.2% | 49% | 70.6% |
| Chinese | 15.1% | 13.2% | 6.1% |
| English | 11.1% | 10.9% | 7.4% |
| Russian | 5.8% | 11% | 3.3% |
| Turkmen | 1.2% | 1.3% | 2.1% |
| Arabic | 0.9% | 1.4% | — |
Share of channels with 1,000+ subscribers, by the language of the channel description. The rest is mixed or undetected.
Persian leads every group, the legacy of Iran's Telegram ban since 2018. Where Telegram is blocked. Chinese channels are the second-largest group for proxies. Turkmen, a language with only a few million speakers, shows up in all three, a sign of how restricted Turkmenistan's internet is.
Most of them have gone quiet
Only 13.8% of proxy channels, 12.1% of VPN channels and 15.7% of V2Ray channels had posted in the 30 days before our 2026-08-13 snapshot. Public proxies rarely last long, so a channel that stopped posting a month ago is mostly handing out addresses that no longer work.
| Proxy channels in | Channels | Posted in last 30 days |
|---|---|---|
| Persian | 907 | 16.3% |
| Chinese | 259 | 7.3% |
| English | 182 | 12.6% |
| Russian | 80 | 12.5% |
That is why a rechecked list beats a channel: our live list only shows proxies that passed a check in the last 20 minutes.
The Russian wave
Telegram channel IDs reveal roughly when a channel was created. Telegram started issuing a new block of IDs on 16 May 2024, so any channel with an ID in that block or later was created after that date. How dating by ID works.
| Proxy and VPN channels in | Channels | Created after May 2024 |
|---|---|---|
| Russian | 277 | 31.4% |
| Chinese | 437 | 20.4% |
| English | 385 | 17.9% |
| Arabic | 45 | 17.8% |
| Persian | 1,529 | 14.7% |
Russian-language channels are the youngest by far: 31.4% were created after May 2024, twice the Persian share (14.7%), with Chinese at 20.4%. They track Russia's escalating restrictions: voice calls in Telegram were blocked in August 2025 and the app itself was throttled from February 2026. Our snapshot ends in August 2026, so channels created during the 2026 slowdown are only partly counted.
The largest channels
Active proxy channels with the most subscribers in our index:
| Channel | Subscribers |
|---|---|
| Proxy MTProto | 11.8M |
| اینترنت آزاد | 2.5M |
| پروکسی | Fast Proxy | 1.3M |
| Proxy MTProto | 752K |
| IR X2ray | FREE | 552K |
| FeriProxy | 412K |
| Irane Azad Net | 336K |
| MTelProto | 287K |
| AchaVPN | 261K |
And the largest V2Ray config channels:
| Channel | Subscribers |
|---|---|
| V2rayNG | 128K |
| V2RAYNG V2ray | 83K |
| Proxy / v2ray | 16K |
| Daily Configs | 15K |
| Vless VPN | Free Keys | 15K |
Subscriber counts on these channels are not the same as readers. Many of them sell ads: 49% of proxy channels with 10,000+ subscribers carry advertising, and 14.5% share an advertising contact with other channels. Check any of them with the channel audit or the network checker. The full list is on the VPN and proxy topic page.
How we counted
Channels come from our index of public Telegram channels, snapshot of 2026-08-13, counting channels with 1,000+ subscribers and one row per channel ID. A channel is a proxy channel if it carries a tag such as proxy, mtproto or proxy-list; a VPN channel for tags such as vpn or openvpn; a V2Ray channel for v2ray, vless, v2rayng or shadowsocks. Tags and languages are assigned automatically from channel descriptions and posts, so some channels are missed or misfiled. “Posted in the last 30 days” uses the channel's latest post date at the time of the snapshot.