Telegram founder Pavel Durov said in a recent post that the messaging app plans to embed a native, non-custodial Gram wallet into every version of Telegram this summer. Durov described the plan as the "largest rollout of a non-custodial crypto wallet in human history." He said the wallet would allow users to send cryptocurrency instantly and without fees.
🌍 This summer will see the largest rollout of a non-custodial crypto wallet in human history.
— Pavel Durov (@durov) July 21, 2026
⚡️Instant zero-fee crypto transactions for over a billion users are about to become reality.
We're bringing a native non-custodial Gram wallet to every Telegram app! 💎
Telegram counted more than one billion monthly active users in 2025, according to the company. That figure gives the wallet a potential reach that few standalone crypto applications have approached. Durov has not disclosed a firm launch date, whether the wallet will require opt-in, or how key recovery will work for users unfamiliar with self-custody. A non-custodial wallet means the user holds the private key and Telegram does not, so a lost key carries no support fallback.
The gap between announcement and detail matters here. Telegram already runs two crypto products inside the app: the custodial @wallet bot, live since April 2022, and TON Space, a self-custodial option that has existed for years but never achieved mass distribution. What Durov describes now is a change in default and scale rather than a new capability.
Gram price moves on the announcement
Gram, the token that traded as Toncoin until last month, climbed to an intraday high of $1.66 then fell back to about $1.51, a gain of roughly 5.5% over 24 hours, according to CoinGecko. Other coverage placed the move closer to 7% from a separate reference point near $1.40.
On-chain activity accompanied the price move. Total value locked in TON-based DeFi protocols stood at roughly $66 million. The network recorded about 117,600 active addresses over the prior 24 hours, according to DeFiLlama, alongside 3.85 million transactions in the same period. Stablecoins on TON carried a market capitalization near $790 million, with Tether's USDT making up roughly 85% of that supply.
The token remains well below its May peak near $2.80. Resistance sits around $1.60, a level sellers have defended in recent sessions. A break above it could open room toward $1.80, while a failure to hold current gains risks a retest of support near $1.40.
Network upgrades set up the fee cut
The zero-fee claim rests on real technical changes rather than marketing alone. TON activated its Catchain 2.0 consensus upgrade on April 9, which cut block times from roughly 2.5 seconds to about 400 milliseconds and reduced settlement from around 10 seconds to approximately one second. Durov said in May that network fees had fallen sixfold toward near zero. That is inexpensive, but it is not free, and the difference will matter once real transaction volume arrives on a wallet used by a billion people.
The token itself was renamed from Toncoin to Gram in June following a community governance vote, a move that revived the name Telegram used in its original 2018 blockchain white paper. Durov said the rename involved no token swap and required no action from holders, validators or DeFi integrations.
A second attempt, with more control this time
Durov made a similar promise once before. In November 2022, he said Telegram would build non-custodial wallets and a decentralized exchange, a response to the centralization exposed by the collapse of FTX. That version never shipped at the scale now proposed.
What changed since then is control rather than concept. Telegram replaced the TON Foundation as the network's primary steward earlier this year and became its largest validator. The June rename revived a brand tied directly to the 2019 case brought by the US Securities and Exchange Commission, which halted a $1.7 billion token sale and led to a settlement that returned $1.2 billion to investors along with an $18.5 million penalty. The wallet announcement follows what Durov has called a seven-step roadmap; the rename was step four.
Telegram has not said how the new wallet will interact with the existing custodial Wallet product already inside the app, nor how the rollout will handle jurisdictions that restrict in-app crypto services. Those answers, along with an actual launch date, remain outstanding as the stated summer window approaches.
Tanya Petrusenko
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