Telegram, the mobile messaging app that offers secure communications created by VK.com co-founders Nikolai and Pavel Durov, today announced a new milestone in its traction, which has increased considerably since Facebook acquired rival WhatsApp: The app hit 35 million users, and TechCrunch has clarified with Pavel Durov that that number represents total monthly active users. Daily actives are now in excess of 15 million, and the startup has seen 8 billion messages received on its network over the past 30 days.

That’s a considerable increase in traction from the last time Telegram shared numbers – in October, it had only 100,000 daily actives, but the last time it reported a milestone stat it had seen a huge bumps in downloads on the back of the FB/Whatsapp acquisition news, racking up nearly 5 million downloads in the course of a single day.

If you’re looking for a hockey stick graph, this is a pretty damned impressive one. The Telegram app hasn’t been resting on its heels over the course of the intervening months between that 100,000 DAU figure and today’s 15 million number, however; it consistently releases updates that improve features, like the new change to how secret chats work that remove the conversation from both party’s devices, adds audio messages and builds in background downloading of message content.

There are a lot of messaging apps vying to be the next king of the castle as some look to Whatsapp’s growth trajectory to lapse in the wake of its acquisition by Facebook. With 14,900 percent increase in daily actives over the course of just about five months, however, Telegram looks like it might be giving the legacy players on the market an impressive run for their money as a worthy successor to the independent messaging crown.