Telegram founder Pavel Durov said Telegram will roll out a native, non-custodial Gram wallet across every version of the messaging app this summer, putting a self-custody crypto wallet in front of the platform’s more than 1 billion users.
In a July 21 post, Durov said he is “implementing a native non-custodial Gram wallet in every Telegram app” and described the plan as “the largest deployment of a non-custodial crypto wallet in history.” He said the wallet will support instant, fee-free transfers of Gram, the token known as Toncoin until last month.
Launch details are still limited
A non-custodial wallet gives users control of their own private keys and direct control over their assets instead of leaving funds with a third party. Telegram has not published a firm launch date, a full list of supported assets, or other technical specifications.
Durov also has not said how the new wallet will affect the existing custodial Wallet product inside Telegram, or how the company plans to manage the rollout in jurisdictions that restrict in-app crypto services.
Gram moved higher as TON metrics showed activity
According to CoinGecko, Gram climbed to an intraday high of $1.66 before easing to about $1.52, leaving it up 5.5% over the past 24 hours.
DeFiLlama data showed total value locked across TON-based DeFi protocols at about $66 million. Over the prior 24 hours, the network recorded roughly 117,600 active addresses and 3.85 million transactions.
Stablecoins on TON had a market capitalization of about $790 million, with Tether’s USDT making up roughly 85% of that supply.
Part of Durov’s “Make TON Great Again” plan
The wallet marks the latest step in a plan Durov began outlining in April to tie The Open Network, or TON, more closely to Telegram.
Under the seven-step roadmap he called “Make TON Great Again,” Telegram moved to replace the TON Foundation as the network’s primary driver and became its largest validator. Network fees were also reduced by roughly sixfold toward near-zero, which Durov linked to the fee-free transfers described for the new wallet.
The token itself was renamed from Toncoin to Gram in June after a community governance vote, bringing back the name used in Telegram’s original 2018 blockchain whitepaper. The Defiant reported at the time that the token rose as much as 19% on the rebrand. Durov said then that the move was only a branding change, with no token swap and no action required from holders, validators, or DeFi integrations.
A token name with Telegram history
Gram was the token Telegram originally tried to launch between 2018 and 2019. The project raised about $1.7 billion from investors before the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission moved to stop the sale in 2020.
Telegram later abandoned the project and returned funds to investors. A group of independent developers then revived the codebase under the Toncoin name and under the TON Foundation.
Since then, Telegram has introduced crypto features into the app in stages, including the custodial Wallet mini app and a self-custodial option built on TON. Durov said in March 2025 that Telegram had passed 1 billion monthly active users, the figure he now points to as the addressable base for the native Gram wallet.