Telegram CEO Pavel Durov announced plans to ship a native non-custodial crypto wallet for GRAM to the messaging app’s entire global user base of roughly 1 billion people this summer. Durov called it “the largest rollout of a non-custodial crypto wallet in human history” in a Telegram post that garnered over 377,000 views within the first hour.
The wallet will allow users to hold their own private keys, ensuring full self-custody, and will offer instant, zero-fee transactions. This move extends Telegram’s earlier payments push through TON Pay inside Mini Apps and builds on the seven-step “Make TON Great Again” (MTONGA) roadmap. Previous steps already delivered a 10x speed upgrade with sub-second finality, a sixfold fee cut to ~$0.0005 per transaction, Telegram replacing the TON Foundation as the network’s largest validator, and the June rebrand from Toncoin to GRAM after a community vote with 81.22% support.
The news triggered an immediate price reaction. GRAM broke out of a two-week range near $1.43, spiking 8% to an intraday high of $1.546 on the highest hourly volume in weeks. At the time of writing, GRAM trades around $1.52, retaining roughly 6.5% of the gains. The hourly RSI entered overbought territory at 75, suggesting short-term consolidation rather than a straight continuation. Holding the $1.44–$1.46 band would keep the breakout intact; a slip back below $1.43 could mark another headline fade.
The announcement attacks a key metric: the activation gap. Despite Telegram’s 1 billion monthly users, The Open Network counted only 1.78 million monthly active wallets. CoinShares had set a $3.50 base case for GRAM, contingent on actual transaction adoption. The real test will be usage growth by Q3 end, especially with a scheduled unlock of 2.8 million GRAM on July 27 adding supply pressure. Telegram’s crypto journey originally began in 2018 but was abandoned after an SEC lawsuit halted GRAM token sales. The new wallet marks a decisive step toward mainstream crypto adoption, though skepticism remains until user activity inflects visibly.
