Telegram will give more than a billion users their own crypto wallet — Gram Wallet — with instant, fee-free transactions, founder Pavel Durov says. The rollout is set for sometime this summer.
It was in a post on X last week that Telegram founder Pavel Durov announced the app is rolling out Gram Wallet, a self-custody crypto wallet, to more than a billion users. The announcement comes just weeks after the blockchain Telegram originally built in 2018 was renamed from Toncoin to Gram through a governance vote. The move is the fourth step in a plan Durov himself has called "Make TON Great Again," under which Telegram has gradually tightened its ties to the blockchain it walked away from after regulatory pressure in 2020.
Durov described the launch as "the largest rollout of a non-custodial crypto wallet in human history." The billion-user figure is not a loose estimate: Durov said in March 2025 that Telegram had surpassed one billion monthly active users, and that is the figure he now cites as the addressable base for Gram Wallet.
What's new is that the wallet will be built into the app itself, rather than an add-on feature users have to find and activate. Telegram already runs a wallet bot, @wallet, with more than 150 million registered users, operated by the separate company The Open Platform. There, custodial storage is the default, with self-custody available as an option users must switch on themselves. Gram Wallet, by contrast, is set to be non-custodial from the start. Neither Telegram nor Durov has disclosed a firm launch date, a full list of which assets the wallet will support beyond Gram, or how the @wallet bot will be affected — nor how the rollout will be handled in jurisdictions that restrict in-app crypto services.
The announcement had an immediate market effect: Gram jumped 5.5–7% in the hours that followed, according to The Defiant and Decrypt, and remains well below its May peak. On-chain, data from DeFiLlama, cited by The Defiant, showed a modest uptick in activity on the TON network, with roughly $66 million locked in DeFi protocols and a stablecoin supply of about $790 million, of which USDT — issued by Tether — accounts for the majority.
Non-custodial means users generate their own 24-word recovery phrase locally on the device and hold their own private keys, bearing full responsibility if the phrase is lost. That contrasts with today's @wallet bot, where Telegram (via The Open Platform) holds the keys on the user's behalf by default. According to wallet provider MyTonWallet, Gram Wallet is built on the company's technology, with Telegram-native features such as two-point confirmation tied directly to a user's Telegram account for transfers, swaps, and other actions inside the messaging app.
The rename from Toncoin to Gram has a long backstory. Telegram raised about $1.7 billion in 2018 by selling Gram tokens to private investors, with plans to distribute them to the app's hundreds of millions of users. The SEC halted the project in 2019 and prevailed in arguing the sale amounted to an unregistered securities offering. Telegram abandoned the project in 2020, paid an $18.5 million civil penalty, and returned more than $1.2 billion to investors.
Independent developers nonetheless carried the open-source code forward and built what became The Open Network (TON), with Toncoin as its own token — deliberately distanced from the Gram name to avoid that regulatory legacy. On June 15 this year, the community voted with an 81.22% majority to reclaim the Gram name, one of several steps in Durov's "Make TON Great Again" roadmap. According to The Defiant, the token jumped as much as 19% on the rebrand itself, and Durov stressed at the time that it was a branding change only — no token swap, and no action required from holders, validators, or DeFi integrations. Telegram has also taken over as the network's largest validator from the Swiss TON Foundation, and network fees have been cut roughly sixfold as part of the same roadmap.
Durov's announcement comes amid a period of heightened activity from several major platforms seeking to own the digital payments layer. X Money launched on June 26 for U.S. Premium subscribers, offering 6% interest on deposits and transfers via Visa Direct — without crypto or stock trading for now, though that is flagged on its roadmap. Meta is reported to have sent requests to third-party stablecoin providers for integration into WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook in the second half of 2026, following the collapse of its earlier Libra/Diem venture under regulatory pressure.
What sets Telegram's approach apart is the combination of user base, speed, and genuine self-ownership of the keys. Both X Money and Meta's planned solution are custodial, run through regulated third parties, while Telegram is betting that users will take responsibility for their own keys.
Telegram's renewed central role in the TON ecosystem raises many of the same questions the SEC asked in 2020. The rebrand and the decentralized governance model give the project some distance from that history — Telegram now formally operates as a validator on the network, not as the issuer of the token.
At the same time, a different kind of risk remains: Durov was arrested in France in August 2024 and released on bail, and his legal situation is still unresolved. That's a reminder of how closely the network is tied to a single individual. Whether a billion users actually adopt self-custody wallets remains to be seen — the technology is ready; the question is whether ordinary users are willing to trust themselves with a 24-word phrase.
Sources: X (@durov), Decrypt, The Defiant, Glitchwire, crypto.news
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