Summary Pavel Durov’s July 21, 2026 announcement of a native, self-custodial Gram Wallet sent GRAM up as much as 10% and doubled trading volume. Daily transactions rose 11.88% week over week,
Pavel Durov used his official Telegram channel on July 21, 2026 to announce that a self-custodial crypto wallet will ship baked into the core code of every Telegram build, not as an optional bot users have to find. The token behind it, GRAM (the asset formerly known as Toncoin), jumped between 7.7% and 10% within hours, moving from around $1.36 to above $1.55.
This summer will see the largest rollout of a non-custodial crypto wallet in human history.
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!
— Pavel Durov (@durov) July 21, 2026
The reaction looks impressive on a chart. It looks less impressive once the on-chain activity, token supply mechanics and liquidity depth behind that chart get pulled apart. None of it changes what the chain is actually doing underneath.
Until now, Telegram users who wanted crypto had to go looking for it. The @wallet product, operated by an affiliated entity called The Open Platform, reached 150 million registered users by early 2026, but it worked as an add-on. Users searched for the bot, and by default the platform held the private keys on their behalf.
The new build removes that step entirely. Self-custody becomes the default state of the wallet the moment someone updates Telegram, with no bot search and no custodial fallback. Even a 2% activation rate across Telegram’s 1 billion monthly users would create a self-custodial base larger than the entire existing DeFi user population combined.
Hardcoding private-key ownership into the app is a product decision with a legal function attached. Once users hold their own keys, Telegram cannot freeze funds or comply with an asset seizure order the way a custodial platform would. That is precisely the point for supporters of the design, and precisely the risk that concerns regulators.
Telegram has already confirmed the wallet will be restricted or unavailable in the United States and several other jurisdictions with strict compliance regimes. The company knows this territory well. It abandoned its first blockchain venture in 2020 after an $18.5 million SEC settlement. Betting on sovereign, unhosted digital money a second time invites the same kind of scrutiny from international financial task forces focused on unhosted wallets and capital flight, only now applied to a platform with a billion monthly users instead of a token pre-sale.
The announcement did move real usage, not just the price. Daily transactions reached 3,168,350, up 11.88% over the prior week, a gain directly tied to Durov’s post. Block production also improved after the Catchain 2.0 upgrade, which brought generation times down to 400 milliseconds with roughly one-second deterministic finality, addressing the network halts that hit TON during past high-traffic mint events.
The gap between registered accounts and daily activity tells the other half of the story.
MetricValueTotal registered accounts162 millionDaily active addresses288,546Daily transactions3,168,350 (+11.88% weekly)Block finality~1 second, 400ms block timeFewer than 0.2% of all registered accounts touched the chain on a given day even after the announcement spike. Millions of people clicked a bot or a mini-app at some point since TON launched. Very few of them use it daily. Whether the native wallet changes that ratio, rather than the news cycle around it, is the real test of the rollout.
A meaningful signal would be daily actives climbing into the millions and holding there for weeks after the public rollout, not a single-day spike tied to a press cycle.
GRAM has no maximum supply cap, and the daily numbers show why that matters. Validators earn 569,734 GRAM in new block rewards every day. The network burns only 1,008 GRAM in fees over the same period. Net issuance lands at roughly 568,726 GRAM added to supply daily, pushing annual inflation to 1.373%, more than double the network’s historical 0.6% baseline.
Supply metricCurrent valueTotal ledger supply5,204,132,131 GRAMCirculating supply~2.57 billion GRAMDaily block rewards minted569,734 GRAMDaily fees burned1,008 GRAMNet daily issuance+568,726 GRAMAnnual inflation rate1.373%24h network revenue$1,339.66TON’s fee structure stays cheap on purpose, to keep peer-to-peer transfers viable for a mass audience. That same design starves the burn mechanism. With daily revenue sitting under $1,400 against inflation adding well over half a million tokens a day, application volume would need to grow by an order of magnitude before the network’s 50% fee-burn rule could outpace block rewards and push GRAM toward a deflationary state.
Telegram completed its takeover of TON’s validator infrastructure in June 2026, stepping in as the network’s largest single validator and displacing the independent TON Foundation from that operational role. The company has staked 2.2 million GRAM in the process.
That concentration cuts both ways. It removes the coordination friction that slowed TON’s early growth, since the same company running the app also secures the chain underneath it. It also means a regulatory action against Telegram’s corporate infrastructure would hit the consensus layer directly, not just a wallet feature.
Headline staking yields on TON already rank among the highest of any top-50 layer-1 network, but once monthly unlocks and continuous dilution get factored in, the real economic return sits well below the advertised rate. Two scheduled unlock events cap how far GRAM can realistically run even if wallet adoption accelerates. Around 37 million GRAM enters circulation every 30 days through a linear unlock schedule that continues uninterrupted until April 2029. Separately, a much larger block of early investor tokens, 1.081 billion GRAM held under what traders call the “whale freeze,” unlocks in full on February 21, 2027.
GRAM still trades roughly 88% below its May 2026 peak of $2.89, and its 200-day exponential moving average sits above the current price, a technical signal that the broader trend remains bearish regardless of short-term news spikes. A supply wall of that size landing before the token has recovered even half its prior high adds a second layer of pressure beyond wallet adoption numbers.
Look past price and supply, and TON’s DeFi footprint looks thin relative to its valuation. Total value locked across the ecosystem sits between $248 million and $373 million depending on how staking positions get valued, against a $4.18 billion market cap. That puts the market cap to TVL ratio above 11x, a gap wide enough to suggest speculation on the token runs far ahead of capital actually deployed inside its applications.
Liquid staking protocols such as Tonstakers account for roughly 55% of locked capital. STON.fi, the largest automated market maker on TON, holds around 25%, with DeDust taking another 15%. Meme launchpads and smaller emerging protocols split the remaining 5%.
Stablecoins compound the picture. TON’s total stablecoin market cap stands at $790.61 million, with Tether controlling 84.78% of that supply. Almost none of it works inside DeFi. Instead, hundreds of millions in USDT sit in personal balances used for peer-to-peer transfers between Telegram contacts, disconnected from the yield pools that would normally put that liquidity to work.
The wallet rollout gives Telegram a distribution advantage no other self-custodial product has ever had access to, but distribution alone will not fix an inflationary token or a validator structure concentrated in one company’s hands. Adoption metrics after the full public release, not the announcement-day price spike, will show whether daily active addresses close the gap with the 162 million registered accounts already sitting dormant.
The next concrete catalyst worth tracking sits outside the wallet itself. STON.fi’s planned Q3 2026 protocol upgrade introduces concentrated liquidity support, a change that would let liquidity providers target tighter price ranges and use capital more efficiently. If it ships on schedule, it could pull some of the 55% of TVL currently parked in passive staking into active trading pools, doing more for TON’s thin DeFi liquidity than the wallet launch has managed so far.
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