Durov Reports 700,000 Gram Wallets Activated on Telegram in 48 Hours

Durov’s 48-Hour Wallet Surge

Pavel Durov put his first large adoption number on Telegram’s Gram rollout on Monday, reporting that more than 700,000 self-custodial Gram wallets were activated inside the messenger over the previous 48 hours. The Telegram chief shared the figure in a post on X, together with a dashboard screenshot showing roughly 329,000 new wallet addresses created per day. “The crypto revolution is going strong,” he wrote in the same post. The design behind the count comes from the Gram documentation: a wallet is generated automatically the first time a user receives a token transfer. Activation therefore measures people being paid in Gram rather than people who chose to install anything, which is why a daily creation rate can run this high on a platform with more than 1 billion accounts. Durov announced the product behind it in July, when he said a native non-custodial wallet would ship inside every Telegram app. He framed the rollout as the largest deployment of a non-custodial crypto wallet in history and promised instant, zero-fee transactions for the platform’s full user base. Because the wallet is non-custodial, holders keep their own private keys rather than trusting Telegram with them, a break from the custodial Wallet product the app has carried for years. TON developer Andrew Rogozov has confirmed the two stay separate, with onboarding for the new wallet happening natively inside standard chat windows. Durov’s post did not state what share of the new wallets belongs to active users, and no breakdown of balances or transaction sizes accompanied the announcement. That placement is the core of the distribution case: a wallet appearing inside the chat where payment already happens removes the install step that usually limits self-custody growth, and the 48-hour figure is the first large-scale read on whether the mechanism performs at Telegram’s traffic levels.

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From SEC Lawsuit to Gram

The rollout closes a loop that opened five years ago. In 2020, Durov shut down the original Telegram Open Network and returned more than $1.2 billion to investors after a lawsuit from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Community developers kept the open-source code alive as The Open Network, and the chain that grew out of it trades as Toncoin (GRAM). Telegram re-entered the project this year under Durov’s “Make TON Great Again” campaign, becoming the network’s largest validator and cutting TON transaction fees sixfold. In June, a community vote renamed the token back to Gram with 81% support, and the wallet integration followed in July. Usage inside the network has not kept pace with wallet creation. DeFi data shows total value locked across TON at $42.01 million, and the new addresses are largely carrying microtransactions: purchases of Telegram Premium, payments for in-app ads and small peer-to-peer transfers. The split between the custodial Wallet and the self-custodial newcomer mirrors the wider choice among the main types of crypto wallets, but Telegram’s validator weight has also drawn centralization criticism from industry observers. The native wallet remains unavailable to US users, narrowing the base behind the billion-account promise. Price has not followed the adoption curve: Gram trades at $1.05, more than 87% below its 2024 high of $8.25. The token last held above the $1.00 mark after a 4.5% daily slide, and our Gram technical analysis tracks the support levels that matter at this price. Even with wallet metrics setting records, the token remains deep in a bear market by its own history. The gap between address growth and locked value frames the question the next phase of the rollout has to answer: whether wallets created by receipt turn into wallets that hold.

Adoption Outruns Liquidity

The 700,000 figure records distribution, not depth. A wallet that opens on receipt costs its holder nothing and requires no decision, so the count should keep climbing while transfers flow; the harder question is what those wallets hold. Against $42.01 million in total value locked, the current answer is small payments rather than stored balances. Self-custody also shifts responsibility onto users who never asked for it: a lost private key has no support desk, and cold-storage habits built around a hardware wallet do not transfer to an audience created by an incoming payment. Durov has committed to zero-fee transfers inside every Telegram app, but the company has not stated what share of its user base the native wallet is meant to reach, and the wallet stays out of US reach for now.