On June 15, 2026, Toncoin officially became Gram after a community vote passed with 81.22% support. Only the token’s name, ticker (TON → GRAM) and logo changed. Balances, wallet addresses, staking positions and all on-chain applications carried over untouched. The underlying blockchain remains The Open Network (TON). No airdrop, no migration, no action required from holders. Major exchanges such as KuCoin and MEXC auto-converted balances 1:1 and relabeled markets. During a transition period, some platforms show “Gram (prev. Toncoin)” before dropping the parenthetical.
What changed? Almost nothing
Three things changed: name (Toncoin → Gram), ticker (TON → GRAM) and logo. Everything else is identical to June 14. No supply was minted or burned, no tokenomics were altered. The change is purely cosmetic — a label, not an engineering overhaul. For anyone who understood Toncoin, they already understand Gram.
The name Gram carries a long legacy. In 2018, Telegram launched the Telegram Open Network with Gram as its native token, raising roughly $1.7 billion from private investors. In October 2019, the US SEC halted the project, ruling the sale was an unregistered securities offering. Telegram abandoned the network in 2020, refunding over $1.2 billion and paying a $18.5 million penalty. Gram never traded. Independent developers then rebuilt the network under the name Toncoin to distance themselves from the SEC’s target, creating what today is a top-tier blockchain with millions of users and a full DeFi ecosystem. For six years, the name Gram lay dormant.
Durov’s “Make TON Great Again” plan: Step four
In April 2026, Telegram founder Pavel Durov published a seven-step roadmap called “Make TON Great Again” (MTONGA). The first three steps: Catchain 2.0 upgrade cutting finality to under one second; a roughly six-fold fee reduction to a fraction of a cent; and Telegram replacing the TON Foundation as the primary network steward and becoming its largest validator. The Gram rename is step four — a branding capstone on a strategic reversal. Durov explicitly framed it as a return to roots, signaling that Telegram believes the US regulatory climate has shifted and its nearly-one-billion user base can be turned into Gram users for payments, mini-apps and tipping.
The remaining three steps remain undisclosed. The rename is not an endpoint but a waypoint in a broader campaign.
How Gram works — same asset, new label
Gram is the native token of the TON proof-of-stake blockchain. It pays transaction fees (now about $0.0005 per tx), secures the network via staking, and powers all on-chain applications including Telegram mini-apps, payments and DeFi. The Catchain 2.0 upgrade pushed block times to roughly 400 milliseconds and finality to under a second. A trade-off: faster blocks mean more validator rewards, pushing annual inflation from ~0.6% to ~3.6%. Currently about 2.7 billion Gram circulate, with ongoing scheduled releases. For holders, nothing functionally changed. The open question is whether Durov can convert Telegram’s audience into active Gram users — the strategic goal behind the entire rebranding effort.