Pavel Durov Wants to Give a Billion Telegram Users a Crypto Wallet

Pavel Durov has a big promise to keep before summer ends. Telegram's founder announced on Tuesday that the messaging app—think WhatsApp but larger, with over 1 billion monthly active users—will roll out a native non-custodial cryptocurrency wallet across every version of the app, offering instant, zero-fee crypto transactions to all of them.

The crypto wallet is being built to support Telegram’s native crypto, Gram—formerly known as Toncoin. A non-custodial wallet means users hold the keys to their own funds. Think of it like carrying cash instead of using a bank account: nobody can freeze it, seize it, or block a transaction without your permission.

The existing Wallet bot inside Telegram (@wallet)—which already has over 150 million registered users—runs partly in custodial mode, meaning a company holds the keys on your behalf. Durov's new wallet would change that.

There's a key difference between what Durov announced and what Telegram already has. The existing @wallet is a bot built and operated by The Open Platform—a separate company, not Telegram itself. The new wallet would be native to the app, meaning baked into every version of Telegram rather than something users have to find and activate.

The @wallet bot also defaults to custodial mode unless you deliberately switch to its self-custody layer; the new wallet would be non-custodial from the start. Several specifics are still unannounced: whether the new wallet replaces or coexists with @wallet, which assets it will support beyond Gram, and how key management will work at scale for people who have never touched crypto before.

Durov called it "the largest rollout of a non-custodial crypto wallet in human history." The math holds up at least in theory. Metamask, the most widely used self-custody wallet in crypto, counts tens of millions of users. Nothing in the crypto space has ever launched with a billion-user base on day one.

Gram—the native token of The Open Network, the blockchain powering Telegram's crypto ecosystem—jumped roughly 7% on the announcement, climbing back above $1.52 at a $4.18 billion market cap from lows near $1.36 the day before. That partially offset a punishing 25% slide the coin posted through most of July, though it still closed the day well short of recovery.

To understand why this matters, you need the backstory. Telegram created the original network in 2018, raising $1.7 billion from investors for a token it planned to call Gram. Then the SEC sued, arguing those tokens were unregistered securities.

Telegram settled in 2020, returned $1.2 billion to investors, paid an $18.5 million civil penalty, and walked away from the project. Community developers kept the chain alive as Toncoin for years, until Durov retook the reins in 2026.

In June, the rebrand from Toncoin to Gram went live following an 81% community vote—restoring the name Durov originally had in mind back in 2018. Today's wallet announcement is the next step in what he has called "Make TON Great Again."

A built-in wallet means the average Telegram user may send crypto in the same way they send a text message—no exchange account required, no bank transfer, no middleman clipping a percentage. Small businesses and retailers also get a payment channel with a billion-person reach and zero transaction fees, which no card network can match. For investors, the picture is more complicated.

If you want to buy the news, you may want to look at the bigger picture and be prepared to hodl your tokens for a while.

Gram's 200-day exponential moving average—a long-term trend indicator that averages the past 200 days of price data and signals whether a coin is in a sustained uptrend or downtrend—sits well above the current price, confirming the broader trend is still bearish.

The all-time high of $8.25, set in June 2024 during Telegram's tap-to-earn gaming craze, is another matter entirely. The more immediate milestone—the $2.89 peak from May 2026, when Telegram first announced its takeover of the network—would require an 88% rally from today's price.

No launch date beyond "this summer" has been given as of yet.