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About Telegram
Telegram is a messaging app with over a billion monthly users and one of the largest on-ramps into crypto: a built-in custodial wallet, a Mini App platform and Stars payments, with TON as the only settlement chain for Mini Apps and USDT issued natively on TON. It removes the entry barrier for ordinary users — no seed phrase, no separate wallet, transfers and apps inside the chat window.
That convenience rests on custody: the built-in wallet is run by a licensed entity, users hold no private keys, and assets can be restricted by the platform. TON Connect links Mini Apps to external wallets, giving ecosystem projects distribution. On April 30 Telegram staked 2.2 million TON to become the network's largest validator, tightening its link to the chain; for regulators, the boundary of "platform as infrastructure" grows blurrier still.
Telegram raised $1.7 billion in a 2018 TON token sale, settled with the SEC for $18.5 million in 2020 and exited, leaving the open-source code to the community relaunch as The Open Network.
Fragment launched in 2021, auctioning usernames and virtual numbers for Toncoin; Telegram added a custodial wallet in 2023, wiring a billion users to the chain, and Notcoin and Hamster Kombat pushed mini apps to tens of millions in 2024 as Tether issued USDT on TON that April.
In August 2024 founder Pavel Durov was arrested and charged in France, shaking the TON ecosystem and pricing the risk of tying a chain to one platform for the first time, even as USDT and wallet users kept growing.
Restrictions eased in 2025 as Telegram turned to monetization and TON's center of gravity moved to payments and DeFi; in April 2026 it staked 2.2 million TON to become a network validator, moving from promoter to infrastructure participant and holding large TON reserves of its own.
On May 4, 2026 Durov said Telegram would replace the TON Foundation as primary steward under a "Make TON Great Again" roadmap, raising questions about decentralization.
Toncoin was rebranded Gram in June, Catchain 2.0 cut block times to about 400 milliseconds and fees to $0.0005, and TON Pay let mini apps accept payments directly.
On July 21 Durov announced a native non-custodial Gram wallet embedded in every client for a billion-plus users, starting on the web and supporting jettons and NFTs, the largest self-custody rollout attempted in crypto.
On April 9, 2026, TON, in the Telegram ecosystem, activated the Catchain 2.0 consensus upgrade on mainnet, cutting block time from about 10 seconds to 400 milliseconds with sub-second finality and roughly 10x overall network speed; later that month transaction fees were cut 6x to about 0.00039 TON (roughly $0.0005).
On May 4, Pavel Durov announced that Telegram would replace the TON Foundation as the network's primary steward and become its largest validator (staking about 2.2M TON); a community referendum from June 1 to 8 renamed Toncoin to Gram (81.22% approval), taking effect on June 15 with the ticker changing from TON to GRAM.
Future strategy and roadmap: Four of the seven MTONGA steps are complete and steps five to seven have not been announced. Candidates on the TON Foundation's 2026 roadmap include TON Pay 2.0, a layer-2 payments upgrade for instant in-app transactions on Telegram where users do not need to hold TON for gas; Teleport, a trustless Bitcoin bridge using zero-knowledge proofs and multi-party computation to bring BTC into TON-based DeFi; and the AgenticKit autonomous agent framework. Durov has only confirmed further performance upgrades ahead and says most transactions are eventually expected to become fully feeless; deeper Gram wallet and ads integration is also seen as a possible direction.
Pavel Durov is founder and chief executive, graduated in linguistics from Saint Petersburg State University. He founded VKontakte in 2006 and co-founded Telegram with his brother in 2013, and personally controls ownership, strategy and direction as well as external communication.
Nikolai Durov is co-founder and chief technology officer, with a PhD in mathematics from Saint Petersburg State University. He twice won the ACM-ICPC world championship, designed the MTProto encryption protocol and the core architecture of the TON blockchain and leads all technical development.
Ilya Perekopsky is a vice president. He began by co-founding VKontakte in 2006, joined Telegram after leaving Russia in 2014 and handles corporate development, regulatory affairs and external communication as one of Pavel Durov's closest deputies.
John Hyman is chief investment adviser and a former Morgan Stanley executive who ran European equity capital markets. He has stayed on since 2018 to run capital matters and shareholder relations.
July 2025: Wallet in Telegram, the custodial wallet built into Telegram, received a licence from Uzbekistan's National Agency for Perspective Projects to operate as a crypto custodian; service launched 9 December 2025, letting users buy, hold and transfer 200+ digital assets.