Pavel Durov plans to provide encrypted wallets to one billion Telegram users

Pavel Durov has promised to complete a major initiative by the end of summer. Telegram's founders announced on Tuesday that the messaging app with more than 1 billion monthly users (similar to WhatsApp but larger) will launch a native unmanaged cryptocurrency wallet in all versions, providing users with instant, zero-fee cryptocurrency transactions.

This wallet is designed to support Telegram's native cryptocurrency Gram (formerly known as Toncoin). An unmanaged wallet means that the user holds the keys to the funds themselves, just like carrying cash with him rather than using a bank account: No one can freeze, seize funds, or block transactions without your permission.

Some of the existing @wallet robots in Telegram (with more than 150 million registered users) operate in managed mode, in which a company holds the key on its behalf. Durov's new wallet will change that.

There are key differences between what Durov announced and what Telegram already has. The existing @wallet is a robot built and operated by the independent company The Open Platform, not Telegram itself. The new wallet will be natively integrated into the app, that is, built into each version of Telegram, without requiring users to find and activate it themselves.

The @wallet robot adopts managed mode by default unless the user actively switches to its self-managed layer; the new wallet has been unmanaged from the beginning. There are still a number of details that have not yet been announced: whether the new wallet will replace or coexist with @wallet, what assets will be supported in addition to Gram, and how key management will operate on a large scale for users who have never touched cryptocurrency.

Durov called it "the largest unmanaged cryptocurrency wallet deployment in human history." This statement holds true at least in theory. MetaMask, the most widely used self-managed wallet in the cryptocurrency space, has tens of millions of users, and no crypto project has a billion user base on the first day of launch.

Gram, the native token of the open network (the blockchain on which the Telegram crypto ecosystem relies), rose by about 7% after the announcement, rising from a low of about $1.36 the previous day to more than $1.52, with a market value of $4.18 billion. This partly made up for the token's brutal 25% decline during most of July, but the closing price is still far from recovering.

To understand why this is important, you need to understand the background. Telegram created the original network in 2018, raised $1.7 billion from investors and plans to issue a token called Gram. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission subsequently filed a lawsuit alleging that the tokens were unregistered securities.

Telegram reached a settlement in 2020, returning $1.2 billion to investors, paying $18.5 million in civil penalties, and withdrawing from the project. Community developers kept the chain running under the name Toncoin for years until Durov took over again in 2026.

In June this year, after 81% of the community voted in support, Toncoin officially changed its name to Gram, restoring the name Durov originally envisioned in 2018. Today's wallet announcement is the next step in what he calls "making TON great again."

The built-in wallet means that ordinary Telegram users can send cryptocurrency as easily as sending text messages-no exchange account, no bank transfer, no middleman withdrawal. Small businesses and retailers have also gained a payment channel with a billion user coverage and zero transaction fees, unmatched by any card network. For investors, the situation is more complicated.

If you want to buy based on news, you may need to look at the big picture and be prepared to hold coins for the long term.

Gram's 200-day exponential moving average (a long-term trend indicator that averages price data over the past 200 days to determine whether a token is in a sustained upward or downward trend) is well above the current price, indicating that the broader trend remains bearish.

The all-time high of $8.25 set in June 2024 during Telegram's "click to make money" game craze is another matter. A more recent milestone-a peak of $2.89 in May 2026 when Telegram first announced it would take over the network-would require an 88% increase in current prices to be reached.

As of now, the specific launch date after "this summer" has not been announced.