Telegram's Gram Wallet Launch Rolls Toncoin (TON) Self-Custody to 1 Billion Users

Gram Wallet Rollout Begins

Telegram has begun the production rollout of Gram, the built-in self-custodial wallet for Toncoin (TON), moving the project from a months-long preview to a shipping product. Founder Pavel Durov announced the milestone on August 31 in an official channel post, confirming that the wallet is now live for a small initial group of users and will be extended to Telegram's more than one billion users gradually over the next couple of weeks. The announcement follows his July tease of a “summer launch,” and it lands on that timeline. Durov has framed Gram as the largest-scale non-custodial wallet deployment ever attempted, and the design details disclosed alongside the launch show the claim rests on substance rather than marketing.

The most consequential technical element sits in the smart-contract layer driving the wallet. Durov noted that the underlying contracts have been approved by the network's validators, meaning future upgrades will not require the “painful migrations” that have long plagued non-custodial products — historically, every base-contract update forced users to manually move funds to a new version. For a wallet aimed at a billion-person audience, removing that failure point is a load-bearing design decision, not a convenience. It also means the contract can be iterated on after launch without ever interrupting service at scale.

Self-custody is preserved by construction: each user controls their own wallet address through a 24-word recovery phrase, keeping private keys outside Telegram's reach. Gram is built on the MyTonWallet engine and ships as a core feature inside the main Telegram client — not a separate app and not a bot — which compresses the path from messaging to on-chain activity into a few taps. The Toncoin (TON) token itself was renamed to Gram in June, reviving a brand Telegram originally surrendered in 2020 under pressure from a lawsuit by the US Securities and Exchange Commission. The rollout schedule Durov published is the primary record for the launch: an initial batch now, billion-user coverage within weeks.

Walt Takes Over the Trading Desk

The launch reorganizes the rest of Telegram's crypto stack. Wallet in Telegram, the existing built-in service, is rebranding as Walt and will no longer serve as the app's default crypto wallet, becoming reachable through search instead, while Gram takes over the default slot in user settings. The split assigns each product a distinct mandate rather than leaving two wallets to compete inside one client.

Gram operates as Telegram's transaction layer, focused on payments, transfers and purchases — an architecture that mirrors the PayFi model of settling everyday commerce directly on-chain. It supports purchases of Telegram Collectibles, including gifts, usernames and phone numbers, assets that function as NFTs, along with payments for services and day-to-day spending. Walt, by contrast, repositions around a broader trading and investing suite: deposits, holdings and withdrawals for more than 300 crypto assets across four blockchains, trading in more than 200, over 100 tokenized stocks, exchange-traded funds and metals, crypto yield services, and perpetual futures — derivative contracts without an expiration date — on more than 70 assets spanning cryptocurrencies, oil, natural gas and metals. The two platforms remain connected, with Walt accepting multichain crypto deposits that flow into Gram, so users can fund their self-custodial wallet from a wider range of networks.

Andrew Rogozov, founder and CEO of The Open Platform (TOP), the firm behind Walt, characterized the rebrand as the endpoint of a four-year build-out. The service, he noted, started as a simple wallet for buying TON and has grown into a full-scale crypto platform inside Telegram, layering in Earn products, real-world assets and perpetual trading along the way. The rebrand also clarifies for a mainstream audience which surface handles which job: self-custody and payments in the client's core, multi-chain trading one search away. Readers tracking the market in real time can follow live spot and futures prices on Bitget.

Billion-User Distribution Test

Taken together, the two announcements amount to Telegram re-architecting its crypto distribution around self-custody at a scale no consumer platform has attempted, with the Toncoin ecosystem at the center of it. The primary record — Durov's own August 31 post — is explicit on sequencing: an initial user batch now, the billion-user base within weeks. In COINOTAG's assessment, the validator-approved contract path is the detail with the longest shelf life for Toncoin's adoption curve, because it lets the wallet evolve without ever asking a billion users to migrate funds. Active-wallet counts and on-chain transfer volume across the broader altcoin market will show over the coming weeks whether default placement converts Telegram's audience into recurring on-chain users.