Telegram rolled out its built-in non-custodial "Money" wallet to its full user base of over one billion people on October 9, 2026. The wallet supports storage, transfer, and spending of GRAM — the token formerly known as Toncoin, rebranded in June 2026 — with zero network fees on internal transfe...
Telegram rolled out its built-in non-custodial "Money" wallet to its full user base of over one billion people on October 9, 2026. The wallet supports storage, transfer, and spending of GRAM — the token formerly known as Toncoin, rebranded in June 2026 — with zero network fees on internal transfers. GRAM rose 9% to $1.56 on the announcement, pushing market capitalization to $4.13 billion and 24-hour trading volume up 41% to $132.4 million.
The move completes the fourth step of founder Pavel Durov's seven-step "MTONGA" (Make TON Great Again) roadmap, launched in April 2026. The previous three steps — a block-time reduction to 400 milliseconds, a sixfold fee cut to $0.0005 per transfer, and Telegram's assumption of the validator role from the TON Foundation — laid the infrastructure groundwork. The wallet launch is the first user-facing step.
Telegram simultaneously restructured its crypto services into two tiers: Money for everyday payments, and Walt (formerly "Wallet in Telegram," rebranded September 28) for trading and investing across 300+ assets including perpetual futures, tokenized stocks, ETFs, and commodities.
Money is a non-custodial wallet embedded directly in the Telegram messaging application. Unlike custodial solutions — where a platform holds user funds — Money gives users control of their own private keys. The wallet activates when an account receives its first inbound GRAM transfer.
Core functionality includes:
The "zero-fee" claim applies to transfers between Money wallets and between Money and Walt. On-chain TON network fees — currently approximately $0.0005 per transaction following the MTONGA fee reduction — still apply for transfers to external wallets.
The wallet was first announced by Durov on July 21, 2026, with an initial limited rollout beginning August 31. The October 9 expansion opened access to the full user base.
The distinction matters at scale. Telegram claims over one billion registered users. If even a fraction activate Money, the wallet would become the largest non-custodial crypto wallet deployment by registered user count. For comparison, MetaMask reported roughly 30 million monthly active users at its peak, and Phantom reported approximately 15 million.
The token powering Money has its own history. GRAM was the original name used in Telegram's 2018 white paper for the TON blockchain's native token. The SEC sued Telegram in 2019 over its $1.7 billion token sale, forcing the project's abandonment. The community-run TON Foundation later revived the network under the name Toncoin.
On June 15, 2026, after a governance vote passing with 81.22% support, Toncoin was officially renamed back to Gram with the ticker changed from TON to GRAM. The underlying blockchain retains the name "The Open Network" (TON). All balances, staking positions, smart contracts, and NFTs converted at a fixed 1:1 ratio with no user action required.
As of October 10, 2026:
| Metric | Value | |---|---| | Price | $1.44 | | Market Cap | ~$4.07 billion | | CoinMarketCap Rank | #27 | | Circulating Supply | 2.82 billion GRAM | | 24h Trading Volume | $136.7 million |
The price spike on the wallet rollout — 9% in 24 hours — was modest relative to the 95% surge GRAM recorded between September 30 and October 6, which preceded the announcement.
Telegram's crypto strategy now operates on two rails. Money handles simple payments. Walt handles everything else.
Walt, rebranded from "Wallet in Telegram" on September 28, 2026, is a separate application within Telegram offering:
Walt supports deposits and withdrawals for over 300 total assets. Perpetual futures contracts cover crypto, oil, natural gas, and metals. The platform launched futures trading with access to more than 50 initial markets and has expanded since.
The two-tier structure mirrors traditional finance's separation of payments (checking accounts) from investment (brokerage accounts). It also concentrates regulatory risk in Walt — the entity offering leveraged products and tokenized securities — while keeping Money as a simpler payments tool.
The underlying TON blockchain shows mixed signals. User growth is strong; DeFi depth is not.
User Activity:
Monthly active addresses on TON rose from approximately 1.4 million at the start of 2026 to 4.5 million by Q3 — a roughly 3x increase attributed to Telegram integration efforts. The network has approximately 57.8 million activated wallets total, though the vast majority are dormant.
According to Messari's Q1 2026 report, TON processed 171.9 million transactions in Q1 2026, down 4.0% quarter-over-quarter from 179.5 million in Q4 2025. Average daily transactions held essentially flat at 1.91 million.
DeFi:
Total Value Locked (TVL) on TON stands at approximately $49.6–$54.5 million. This is conspicuously low relative to the network's market capitalization and user count. For comparison, Solana's TVL exceeds $7 billion, and Ethereum's exceeds $50 billion. TON's DeFi ecosystem remains underdeveloped — a gap the MTONGA roadmap implicitly acknowledges but has not yet addressed.
Mini App daily active addresses represent 15.4% of TON's 90,789 total daily active addresses, according to Messari. The mini-app ecosystem is a meaningful but not dominant share of on-chain activity.
Durov's seven-step plan, announced April 9, 2026, is designed to make TON viable as a consumer-scale payment and application platform. Four of seven steps are complete:
| Step | Description | Status | |---|---|---| | 1 | Catchain 2.0 — Block time reduced from ~2.5 seconds to ~400 milliseconds | Complete | | 2 | Fee reduction — Transaction fees cut sixfold to ~$0.0005 | Complete | | 3 | Telegram as validator — Telegram replaced the TON Foundation as primary steward and largest validator | Complete | | 4 | Token rebrand — Toncoin renamed to Gram (81.22% governance vote) | Complete | | 5-7 | Undisclosed | Pending |
Steps 1 and 2 addressed infrastructure constraints. Step 3 centralized governance under Telegram itself — a notable departure from the decentralized model the TON Foundation had maintained. Step 4 was branding.
The remaining three steps have not been publicly disclosed. Speculation in the TON community centers on stablecoin integration, fiat on-ramps, and merchant payment tools, but Telegram has not confirmed these.
The governance shift in Step 3 deserves attention. When Telegram replaced the TON Foundation as the network's primary validator and steward, it concentrated operational control in a single corporate entity. This creates a tension: a "non-custodial" wallet running on a network where the wallet provider is also the dominant validator. Users hold their own keys, but the network's liveness and transaction ordering are substantially influenced by one company.
The economic question is where value accrues in Telegram's crypto stack.
Fee structure: Internal Money-to-Money transfers carry zero fees. On-chain transfers cost ~$0.0005. Walt trading fees have not been publicly disclosed but likely follow standard exchange fee schedules. Perpetual futures involve funding rates and spreads.
Revenue model: Telegram does not charge commissions through its Bot Payments API and has historically avoided monetizing payments directly. Walt, however, operates as a trading platform and likely generates revenue from spreads, trading fees, and possibly listing fees for tokenized assets.
Token economics: GRAM's value proposition is tied to its utility within Telegram. If Money wallet adoption scales, demand for GRAM increases through direct usage — paying for gifts, collectible usernames, and person-to-person transfers. However, if users primarily hold GRAM as a speculative asset rather than spending it, velocity stays low and the economic loop remains incomplete.
TVL gap: The $50 million DeFi TVL against a $4 billion market cap represents a TVL-to-market-cap ratio of roughly 1.2%. This is one of the lowest among top-30 tokens. It suggests that GRAM's price is driven more by speculative positioning on Telegram integration narratives than by on-chain economic activity. Whether the Money wallet rollout converts registered users into on-chain participants will determine if this gap closes.
Comparison to super-app models: WeChat Pay processes over $5 trillion annually in payment volume through 1.3 billion users. Telegram's economic ambition appears similar in structure — embed financial services into a messaging platform — but differs in execution. WeChat Pay is custodial, centralized, and fiat-denominated. Money is non-custodial, blockchain-based, and token-denominated. The non-custodial approach limits Telegram's ability to earn float on deposits or intermediate transactions, constraining its revenue potential relative to custodial alternatives.
Telegram has assembled the components of a crypto super-app: a non-custodial wallet (Money), a trading platform (Walt), a rebranded native token (GRAM), and a blockchain it operationally controls (TON). The distribution advantage is real — no other crypto project has embedded access to a billion-user messaging platform.
The open questions are structural. TON's DeFi TVL is thin. The three remaining MTONGA steps are undisclosed. The gap between registered users (1 billion) and monthly active blockchain addresses (4.5 million) is three orders of magnitude. Converting messaging users into blockchain participants at meaningful rates would be without precedent in the industry.
The data will resolve the question. If Money wallet activations translate to on-chain transactions and DeFi deposits, TON's economic model strengthens. If the wallet remains a feature most users ignore — as has been the case with previous messaging-app crypto integrations — the $4 billion market cap is pricing in an outcome that has not materialized.