Telegram's Gram wallet bets on fragile TON economy

Summary

On July 21, 2026, Pavel Durov announced the launch of a native self-hosted Gram wallet. The price of Gram once increased by 10%, and transaction volume doubled. Daily trading volume increased 11.88% from last week, but out of a total of 162 million accounts, only 288,546 addresses were active. GRAM's daily net supply of approximately 568,726 tokens (after deducting destruction) pushed the annual inflation rate to 1.373%. Telegram has now become the largest verifier of the TON network, while DeFi's total liquidity is still less than US$373 million, with a corresponding market value of US$4.18 billion.

Pavel Durov announced on his official Telegram channel on July 21, 2026 that the self-managed crypto wallet will be built directly into the core code of each Telegram version, rather than as an optional robot that users need to find. The token behind it, GRAM (formerly known as Toncoin), rose 7.7% to 10% within hours, rising in price from about $1.36 to more than $1.55.

This summer, the largest unmanaged crypto wallet in human history will be officially launched.

Providing instant zero-fee crypto transactions to more than a billion users is about to become a reality. We are bringing native unmanaged Gram wallets to every Telegram app!

--Pavel Durov (@durov) July 21, 2026

From the chart, this reaction is quite alarming. But once the activities on the chain, the token supply mechanism, and the depth of liquidity behind the charts are disassembled, the results are less impressive. None of these factors can change the actual operation of the chain.

From optional robots to default built-in features

Prior to this, Telegram users who wanted to use cryptocurrency would have to find their own entry point. The @wallet product, operated by affiliated entity The Open Platform, has 150 million registered users by early 2026, but it is just an additional feature. Users need to search for robots, and by default the platform will host their private keys.

The new build eliminates this step completely. After users update Telegram, self-hosting becomes the default state of the wallet, without the need to search for robots, and there is no hosting fallback option. Even if Telegram only had an activation rate of 2% of its 1 billion monthly users, its self-hosted user base would exceed the total of existing DeFi users.

Why self-hosting also removes Telegram's legal cover

Hardcoding private key ownership into an application is a product decision with legal significance. Once users hold their own private keys, Telegram cannot freeze funds or comply with asset seizure orders like an escrow platform can. This is exactly what design proponents intend, and the risks that regulators are worried about.

Telegram has confirmed that the wallet will be restricted or unavailable in the United States and several other jurisdictions with strict compliance requirements. The company is familiar with this area: It abandoned its first blockchain project in 2020 after reaching a $18.5 million settlement with the SEC. The second bet on sovereign, unmanaged digital currencies will once again attract the attention of the International Financial Working Group, which focuses on unmanaged wallets and capital outflows. This time, the platform involved has a billion monthly active users, rather than a token pre-sale.

Activity has increased, but most networks are still dormant

The announcement did drive actual usage, not just prices. Daily transaction volume reached 3,168,350, an increase of 11.88% from the previous week, which was directly attributed to Durov's posts. After the Catchain 2.0 upgrade, block production has also improved. The block extraction time has been reduced to 400 milliseconds, and the certainty is about 1 second, which solves the problem of TON network interruption caused by high-traffic coinage events in the past.

The gap between registering an account and daily activities reveals another side.

Indicator: Total number of registered accounts, value: 162 million

Indicator: Number of daily active addresses, value: 288,546

Indicator: Daily trading volume, value: 3,168,350 (month-on-week growth of 11.88%)

Indicator: Block finality, value: approximately 1 second, block release time 400 milliseconds

Even during the peak period after the announcement, less than 0.2% of registered accounts each day touched online activity. Since TON was launched, millions of people have clicked on a robot or mini app at some point, but few use it every day. Whether native wallet can change this ratio, rather than just the news cycle surrounding it, is the real test of this release.

A meaningful signal should be that the number of daily active users climbed to the millions after the public beta and lasted for weeks, rather than a single-day peak just due to the news cycle.

Supply is growing faster than destroyed tokens

There is no maximum supply limit for RAM, and daily data reveals its importance. Verifiers earn 569,734 GRAMs per day through new block rewards. During the same period, the network destroyed only 1,008 GRAMs through a handling fee. The daily net supply is approximately 568,726 pieces, and the annual inflation rate is 1.373%, more than double the network's historical baseline of 0.6%.

Supply Indicators: Current Value

Ledger supply: 5,204,132,131 GRAMs

Circulation supply: approximately 2.57 billion GRAMs

Daily block reward casting: 569,734 GRAMs

Daily handling fee Destruction: 1,008 GRAMs

Daily net circulation: +568,726 RAM

Annual inflation rate: 1.373%

24-hour network revenue: US$1,339.66

TON's fee structure is deliberately kept low to maintain the accessibility of point-to-point transfers to general users. But the design also weakens the destruction mechanism. With daily income of less than US$1400 and inflation increasing by more than 500,000 tokens per day, the application volume needs to increase by an order of magnitude before the network's 50% fee destruction rule can exceed the block reward, putting the GRAM into a deflationary state.

Single verifier, over-control

Telegram completed its takeover of the TON verifier infrastructure in June 2026, becoming the network's largest single verifier and replacing the independent TON Foundation in this operating role. The company pledged 2.2 million GRAMs in the process.

This centralization has both advantages and disadvantages. It eliminates the coordination friction that early hindered TON's development-because the same company both operated applications and protected the security of its underlying chain. But it also means that regulatory action against Telegram's infrastructure will directly hit the consensus layer, not just wallet functionality.

Two supply walls preventing any rebound

TON's head pledge yields have ranked among the top 50 Layer-1 networks, but once monthly unlocking and continued dilution are considered, the actual economic return is far lower than the advertised interest rate. Even with wallet adoption acceleration, unlocking events in both plans limit the actual upside of the GRAMs. About 37 million GRAMs enter circulation every month through the linear unlock program, which will last until April 2029. In addition, a larger batch of early investor tokens-what traders call the "whale freeze"-totaling 1.081 billion GRAM will be unlocked on February 21, 2027.

Grain is still down about 88% from its May 2026 peak of $2.89, and its 200-day exponential moving average is above current prices, a technical signal that even with short-term news stimulus, the broader trend remains bearish. With tokens not yet restored to half of their previous highs, a supply wall of this magnitude will put a second layer of pressure on prices that goes beyond wallet adoption data.

Liquidity reveals a different story than market value

Putting aside price and supply, TON's DeFi footprint is weak relative to its valuation. The total value locked in the ecosystem is between $248 million and $373 million (depending on how the pledged positions are valued), with a market value of $4.18 billion. This puts the market capital-to-TVL ratio of more than 11 times, a gap enough to show that speculation on tokens is far ahead of the capital actually deployed in their applications.

Liquidity pledge agreements (such as Tonstakers) account for approximately 55% of locked capital. STON.fi is the largest automated market maker on TON, holding approximately 25%, and DeDust holds 15%. The Meme launch pad and smaller emerging agreements split the remaining 5%.

stablecoins further exacerbate this situation. TON's total market value of stablecoins is US$790.61 million, of which Tether accounts for 84.78% of the supply. These stablecoins hardly function in DeFi; instead, hundreds of millions of dollars of USDT are stored in personal balances for point-to-point transfers between Telegram contacts, completely out of touch with the revenue pool that can normally put liquidity to use.

Distribution advantages are better than adoption, but only on paper.

The launch of the wallet gives Telegram a distribution advantage that no other self-managed product has ever had, but distribution alone cannot solve the problem of inflationary tokens or verifier structure concentrated on one company. Adoption indicators after the full public beta-rather than a price surge on announcement day-will reveal whether daily active addresses can close the gap between them and the 162 million dormant registered accounts.

The next specific catalyst to pay attention to is not in the wallet itself. STON.fi's planned protocol upgrade for the third quarter of 2026 will introduce centralized liquidity support, a change that will allow liquidity providers to target a narrower price range and use capital more efficiently. If implemented as planned, it could attract the current 55% of TVLs from passive pledges to the active trading pool, thus contributing more to TON's weak DeFi liquidity than wallet launches.