Pavel Durov Aims to Give a Crypto Wallet to Telegram’s 1 Billion Users
Pavel Durov, the founder of Telegram, has announced the rollout of a native non-custodial crypto wallet directly integrated into the messaging app. An initiative described by its creator as “the largest non-custodial wallet deployment in human history,” which could transform hundreds of millions of users into participants in the crypto economy.
While crypto adoption still stumbles on technical complexity for the general public, Telegram has just crossed a potentially decisive threshold. Pavel Durov announced via his Telegram channel that the app will natively integrate a non-custodial Gram wallet — meaning users keep full control of their private keys, without any intermediary. The goal: to provide instant, fee-free crypto transactions to over a billion users worldwide.
A Native Wallet, Not Just a Bot
This new tool is markedly different from the existing @wallet bot on Telegram. The bot already has more than 150 million registered users, but it operates primarily in custodial mode — a third party (The Open Platform) holds the users’ keys. The new wallet, on the other hand, would be non-custodial from the start, integrated directly into every version of Telegram rather than through an external bot.
Pavel Durov himself summed up the difference: “The @wallet bot is custodial by default, unless you deliberately switch to its self-custody layer. The new wallet would be non-custodial from the start.” An approach fundamentally aligned with the cryptocurrency philosophy: “not your keys, not your tokens.”
Gram (formerly Toncoin): A Return to Roots
The native token of this ecosystem is the Gram, previously known as Toncoin. The project’s history is full of twists and turns:
- 2018: Telegram creates The Open Network (TON) and raises $1.7 billion from investors for a token called Gram.
- 2020: The SEC sues Telegram, considering the tokens as unregistered securities. Telegram reaches a settlement, repays $1.2 billion to investors, and withdraws from the project.
- 2020-2025: The community keeps the network alive under the name Toncoin.
- June 2026: Pavel Durov resumes control of the project. Following a community vote with 81% approval, the token is renamed Gram, recovering its original name.
Today, the Gram trades around $1.52 with a market cap of $4.18 billion. The wallet announcement pushed the token up 7%, partially reversing a 25% slide suffered since the beginning of the month — but the token remains well below its all-time high of $8.25 reached in June 2024.
“Make TON Great Again”: A 7-Step Plan
This wallet is only the first step of a broader plan that Durov has called “Make TON Great Again” (MTONGA), a 7-point program to revitalize the TON ecosystem:
- ✅ Step 1 (completed): Native non-custodial wallet — the announcement of July 21.
- 🔄 Step 2: Reduction of already very low transaction fees — target: 6 times less.
- ⚡ The TON network has just been upgraded and is now 10 times faster.
The other 5 steps have not yet been revealed. No precise launch date has been communicated, beyond “this summer.”
Potential Impact: The Largest Wallet Deployment in History
To put things in perspective, MetaMask, the most widely used non-custodial wallet in the crypto ecosystem, has tens of millions of users. A wallet integrated into Telegram — 1 billion active users — would represent a leap of an unprecedented order of magnitude. Even if only 10% of Telegram users adopted the wallet, we would be talking about 100 million new crypto users.
The implications are massive:
- Commerce and payments: A native wallet means a merchant can receive crypto payments as easily as a text message — without intermediaries, without fees.
International remittances: Money transfers between countries could become instant and free, directly competing with Western...
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