TON Blockchain: Telegram's Crypto Ecosystem

Introduction

Telegram says more than 1 billion people use its app, yet the seven-day average of daily active addresses on TON, short for The Open Network, was 209,177 in The Block's data updated on 3 November 2026. That gap is the TON story in 2026. Telegram announced in May 2026 that it would replace the TON Foundation as the largest validator (Durov, 2026), Toncoin became Gram in June, and the tap-to-earn tokens that brought tens of millions of players onto the chain now sit more than 95% below their peaks. This article separates Telegram the company from the TON Foundation and from TON Strategy Company, measures block time and decentralized finance (DeFi) activity with dated figures, and lists the checks that keep a beginner away from the scams the rename attracted.

What Is the TON Blockchain, and Why Did Telegram Leave It in 2020?

The TON blockchain began in 2018 as Telegram's own project, was halted by a United States court in 2020, and survived because an open-source community finished it. Telegram announced in May 2026 that it would become the largest validator (Durov, 2026), so the history explains who controls the TON ecosystem today.

From Telegram Open Network to the SEC ruling

Nikolai Durov described the Telegram Open Network in a 2019 white paper, and Telegram Group Inc. and its subsidiary TON Issuer Inc. sold about 2.9 billion Grams to 171 initial purchasers to fund it (SEC, 2020). The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filed a complaint on 11 October 2019, and a federal court issued a preliminary injunction on 24 March 2020 that barred delivery of the Grams (SEC, 2020). Telegram announced that it no longer intended to distribute the Grams or pursue the project. On 26 June 2020 the SEC announced a settlement under which Telegram would return more than $1.2 billion to investors and pay an $18.5 million civil penalty (SEC, 2020).

How the community revived it

The code was open source, so volunteers kept building. By late 2020 a developer community called NewTON was carrying the project forward, and in 2021 it organised as the TON Foundation (The Block, 2024). The native coin, Toncoin, was distributed through proof-of-work mining rather than a token sale, so no investor round funded it (Blockworks, 2026). Telegram's own return came in stages. It chose TON as its Web3 partner in September 2023, integrated a wallet into the app, and from 2024 paid channel owners their advertising revenue share in Toncoin (The Block, 2024). The staged return explains why Telegram and TON are so frequently confused.

The origin explains the design, because the architecture was built for Telegram-scale traffic from the start.

How Does TON Work, and How Fast Is It Today?

TON produced a block every 427 milliseconds in a sample taken on 5 November 2026 and charges a fixed fee below a thousandth of a Gram. The July 2026 benchmark showed that the sharding headroom is capped at four shardchains for now.

Masterchain, workchains and dynamic sharding

TON is a layer 1 (L1) blockchain built as a tree of chains. The masterchain stores the validator set and network configuration, workchains are parallel chains with their own rules, and the basechain, workchain 0, holds most accounts and splits into shardchains as load grows (TON Docs, 2026). That splitting is dynamic sharding, the same broad approach NEAR takes ↗. The white paper allows up to 2^32 workchains with up to 2^60 shards each, which is design capacity rather than deployed capacity (Durov, 2019). Contracts follow the actor model, in which each contract owns its state and communicates only through asynchronous messages, and they run on the TON Virtual Machine (TVM). Developers write them in FunC, Tact or Tolk. TON scales on layer 1 rather than through layer 2 rollups ↗.

Measured speed, fees and the July 2026 incident

The Catchain 2.0 upgrade went live on 9 April 2026 and cut the block interval from about 2.5 seconds to about 400 milliseconds (TON Docs, 2026). A sample for this article on 5 November 2026 counted 10,000 masterchain blocks in 4,274 seconds, or about 427 milliseconds per block (toncenter API, 2026). The project states that a standard transfer costs a fixed 0.00039 Gram (ton.org, 2026). On 13 July 2026 a scheduled benchmark pushed mainnet beyond four shardchains, shardchain block production slowed from about 09:30 UTC, and recovery finished near 11:12 UTC, while the masterchain stayed stable (TON incident postmortem, 2026). Validators then capped shardchains at four, down from 16. An earlier halt on 1 June 2025 lasted about 40 minutes (crypto.news, 2025).

Data current as of November 2026.

These figures describe the chain, but the question most readers bring is who controls it, and that answer changed in 2026.

What Is the Telegram and TON Relationship in 2026, Exactly?

The Telegram crypto relationship has three layers with three different owners. Telegram the company writes the platform rules, the TON Foundation funds the ecosystem, and TON Strategy Company is an unrelated Nasdaq-listed treasury company.

What the January 2025 Mini App rule requires

On 21 January 2025 the TON Foundation announced that TON becomes the exclusive blockchain infrastructure for Telegram's Mini App ecosystem (TON Foundation, 2025). Telegram's Blockchain Guidelines, still live on 5 November 2026, require crypto-enabled Mini Apps to issue tokens and assets only on TON, to connect wallets only through TON Connect, and to promote only TON-based wallets (Telegram, 2026). Existing apps on other chains had until 21 February 2025 to migrate, and regular bots without a Mini App component are exempt (Telegram, 2026). The Foundation also states that Telegram accepts Toncoin (now Gram) as the only cryptocurrency for payments for Stars, Premium and Ads (TON Foundation, 2025). The rule binds developers inside Telegram and does not stop projects from building on other chains outside it, as the Foundation told Cointelegraph (Cointelegraph, 2025).

How Telegram became TON's steward in 2026

Pavel Durov, Telegram's founder, announced on 4 May 2026 that Telegram replaces the TON Foundation as the driving force behind TON and becomes its largest validator, as step 3 of a seven-step plan he calls Make TON Great Again (Durov, 2026). Step 1 was Catchain 2.0 on 9 April 2026, and step 4 was the Gram rename on 15 June 2026 (TON Dev News, 2026). Cointelegraph noted that the announcement left unclear what role the Foundation keeps and how much stake Telegram holds (Cointelegraph, 2026). Durov announced a native non-custodial Gram wallet for all Telegram apps on 21 July 2026 and said on 31 August 2026 that it was ready for a select group (The Block, 2026; TON Strategy Company, 2026).

Telegram, TON Foundation and TON Strategy compared

Three entities share the ecosystem and are frequently treated as one. Telegram Messenger runs the app and sets the Mini App rules. The TON Foundation is a Swiss non-profit that funds grants and ecosystem support (Blockworks, 2026). TON Strategy Company (Nasdaq: TONX) is a listed treasury company that held about 230.5 million Gram on 30 June 2026, roughly 4.4% of supply (TON Strategy Company, 2026). Walt, formerly the Wallet in Telegram bot, is operated by Top.com, according to its chief commercial officer, and was renamed on 28 September 2026 (The Block, 2026). Telegram's claimed billion users are not TON wallets: the 7-day average of daily active addresses was 209,177 in data updated on 3 November 2026 (The Block Data, 2026).

Data current as of November 2026.

Telegram's steward role came with a naming decision that changed the coin's identity on every exchange.

What Is Gram, and What Happened to Toncoin?

Toncoin has been called Gram since 15 June 2026, and its ticker changed from TON to GRAM. The blockchain keeps the name TON, balances did not change, and no swap was required. Pages that still say Toncoin describe the same coin.

The June 2026 rename

A community vote on the TON Vote platform ran from 1 to 8 June 2026 and passed with 81.22% of participating voting power (TON Strategy Company, 2026). Gram was the coin's name in the original white paper and in the 2018 sale (SEC, 2020; Wikipedia, 2026). Exchanges changed on their own schedules: MEXC and KuCoin relabeled on 15 June, while Binance delisted TON pairs on 30 June and opened GRAM trading on 2 July (MEXC, 2026; PlayToEarn, 2026). Projects were asked to show the asset as Gram (prev. Toncoin) for a three-month transition window (PlayToEarn, 2026). The official TON channel states that no swap, bridge, claim or migration exists, and that any site asking holders to claim GRAM is a scam (TON Dev News, 2026).

Where Gram stands today

Gram carries a market capitalisation of $3.30B and ranks 38th among cryptocurrencies (CoinPaprika API, 5 November 2026). The coin's price is $1.16, which is 86.0% below its all-time high of $8.28, reached on 15 June 2024 (CoinPaprika API, 5 November 2026). CoinPaprika reports 2.85 billion Gram in circulation against a 5.24 billion total, and 24-hour trading volume of $19.1M. Telegram's takeover of the validator role and the wallet rollout have not restored the 2024 peak. Staking absorbs a large share of supply: TON Strategy Company alone staked 229.9 million Gram at 30 June 2026 (TON Strategy Company, 2026). This describes the market and offers no forecast.

What Happened to Tap-to-Earn on TON After the 2024 Boom?

Telegram's tap-to-earn games drew claimed audiences in the hundreds of millions in 2024, and as of 5 November 2026 every major token that followed sits more than 96% below its peak. Measured player numbers fell faster than the claims admit.

The 2024 boom and its claimed audiences

Notcoin launched its token on 16 May 2024, DOGS on 26 August 2024, Catizen on 20 September 2024 and Hamster Kombat on 26 September 2024 (CoinPaprika API, 2026). Hamster Kombat's developers claimed about 300 million players, and Telegram's own data showed more than 100 million monthly players in late September 2024 (Decrypt, 2024). TON's daily active wallets passed 1 million in September 2024, according to TonStats (BeInCrypto, 2024). Notcoin's token reached its all-time high on 2 June 2024, about two weeks after launch (CoinPaprika API, 2026). These games ran as Telegram Mini Apps on TON. Player counts from developers are self-reported, so this article treats them as claims and uses Telegram's own data or on-chain data where it exists.

The bust in token and user data

By late October 2024 fewer than 44 million users had played Hamster Kombat in the previous month, down from more than 100 million a month earlier (Decrypt, 2024). Hamster Kombat's monthly active users stood at 5.6 million on 5 May 2025 (SpazioCrypto, 2025). TON's daily active wallets fell below 500,000 by December 2024 (BeInCrypto, 2024). A TON Foundation ecosystem lead told BeInCrypto in December 2024 that the usage drop was expected because the model was designed as a short-term onboarding mechanism (BeInCrypto, 2024). Notcoin's co-founders told Cointelegraph in May 2025 that the tap-to-earn format was probably dead (SpazioCrypto, 2025). The table shows the token drawdowns measured on 5 November 2026 (CoinPaprika API, 2026).

Data current as of November 2026.

Stablecoin balances fell far less than the tokens, as the DeFi data shows.

How Much DeFi and Stablecoin Activity Does TON Hold?

TON decentralized finance (DeFi) holds $44.5M in total value locked (TVL) excluding liquid staking, 94% below its July 2024 peak of $778M (DefiLlama, 5 November 2026). Liquid staking and USDT carry more value on the chain than DeFi proper.

TON TVL and the largest protocols

DefiLlama's chain figure excludes liquid staking, which it tracks separately. STON.fi, a decentralized exchange, holds $21.7M, the EVAA lending protocol $7.2M, DeDust $4.2M and the derivatives protocol Storm Trade $3.8M (DefiLlama, 2026). Liquid staking is larger: Tonstakers holds $171.8M, Stakee $24.8M and Hipo $11.7M. Decentralized exchange volume was $22.7M over seven days and $104.6M over 30 days. The six largest liquid staking protocols DefiLlama lists on TON total about $217M, nearly five times the non-staking figure, though total value locked counts deposits and says nothing about how frequently they are used. Storm Trade paused after an attack on its infrastructure on 21 April 2026, and it reported confirmed damage under 2,000 TON (Storm Trade, 2026).

Data current as of November 2026.

USDT and other stablecoins on TON

Stablecoins circulating on TON total $585.4M, of which Tether's USDT is $500.3M and Ethena's USDe $85.2M, a split of about 85% to 15% (DefiLlama, 5 November 2026). The total was $845.3M a year earlier and peaked at $1.42B on 29 November 2024, so balances are 31% lower than a year ago and 59% below the peak. Tether issued a native USDT on TON in April 2024 (Wikipedia, 2026). A USDT transfer costs about 0.001 Gram (ton.org, 2026), and a Gram balance remains necessary for gas even when sending USDT (TON Community, 2026).

Value on the chain is small enough that safety habits matter more than yields.

How Can a Beginner Use TON Without Falling for Telegram Scams?

A beginner needs to know who holds the keys in each wallet. Telegram's wallets differ on custody, and the June 2026 rename created a ready-made "claim GRAM" scam (TON Dev News, 2026), so the first checks are custody and the source of every link.

Wallets, custody and gas

Custody decides who can move funds. Wallet in Telegram, now Walt, passed 150 million registered users by its own count (The Block, 2026). Telegram describes its Gram Wallet as non-custodial, so the user's keys authorise each transfer (The Block, 2026). Walt's own letter says funds, settings and addresses stay unchanged after its rename, and the Gram Wallet takes Wallet's place in Telegram's settings (Walt, 2026). Telegram widened access to that wallet on 9 October 2026 without publishing a country schedule or user figure (CoinScreamer, 2026). Third-party wallets such as Tonkeeper and MyTonWallet are named in Telegram's guidelines as acceptable TON-based wallets (Telegram, 2026). Every wallet needs a small Gram balance for network fees. Recovery phrases belong offline, and no support team asks for one.

Scam patterns to check first

The official TON channel warned on 1 June 2026 that any site, bot or link asking holders to claim GRAM or migrate TON is a scam (TON Dev News, 2026). A rename needs no transaction from holders, so a prompt to sign one is a wallet drainer. Clone bots copy a marketplace name with one extra character, and impersonators posing as support ask for login codes or recovery phrases that no legitimate service requests (GiftsWatch, 2026). Mini Apps promising an airdrop after a game need checking against the project's official channel. Connecting a wallet is not the risky step; signing a transaction is.

FAQ

?Is the number of Telegram users the same as the number of TON wallets?

No. Telegram claims more than 1 billion users, and Wallet in Telegram reported more than 150 million registered users, but both are self-reported registrations. On-chain data is far smaller: the seven-day average of daily active addresses on TON was 209,177 in data updated on 3 November 2026 (The Block Data, 2026). TonStat's counter of activated wallets read about 62.7 million on 5 November 2026 and counts every wallet ever activated, even dormant ones (TonStat, 2026). Each figure answers a different question.

?How do I stake Gram, and what does staking pay?

Holders can stake Gram directly, through single nominator contracts, through nominator pools or through liquid staking protocols such as Tonstakers, Stakee and Hipo (Blockworks, 2026; DefiLlama, 2026). Yield varies by choice. TON Strategy Company reported a gross annualized staking yield of about 17% for the second quarter of 2026 on its own position (TON Strategy Company, 2026). That is one company's result, not a guaranteed rate, and each option carries the risks of the validator or protocol chosen.

?How does TON differ from Ethereum and its layer 2 networks?

TON scales by sharding its own layer 1, while Ethereum moves execution to rollups that settle on it. L2BEAT tracked 83 active layer 2 projects ↗ with about $38.8B of value secured on 5 November 2026 (L2BEAT, 2026), a day after the tracker renamed itself ETHBEAT. That metric differs from the DefiLlama TVL used for TON, so the two cannot be compared directly. TON also has its own coin, Gram, and its own validators rather than inheriting Ethereum's security.

?Is today's Gram the same token Telegram sold in 2018?

Only the name is shared. The Grams Telegram sold in 2018 were never issued after the court injunction, and Telegram returned more than $1.2 billion to investors (SEC, 2020). The current coin launched through proof-of-work mining with no token sale (Blockworks, 2026), and it carried the name Toncoin until the 15 June 2026 rename. Any offer of "original Grams" is a scam.

?What happens to my tokens if a Mini App developer shuts the game down?

Tokens already distributed sit in the holder's wallet and keep trading, as Notcoin and Hamster Kombat did after their games faded (CoinPaprika API, 2026). Points that never became tokens exist only on the developer's servers. A review of Telegram games reported that Yescoin never delivered its token (WEEX Learn, 2026), which is the outcome to price in before spending time on any points program.

?Can Telegram freeze or reverse a transaction in my wallet?

Telegram describes its Gram Wallet as non-custodial, so the user's keys authorise transfers, and confirmed blockchain transfers cannot be reversed (The Block, 2026; GiftsWatch, 2026). Walt, the separate trading platform, was described as custodial by TokenPost in September 2026, so its operator can apply account controls under its terms (TokenPost, 2026). Telegram can also remove a Mini App from its platform under its developer terms, which affects access to the app rather than tokens in a wallet (Telegram, 2026).

?Are Telegram Stars the same as crypto?

No. Stars are Telegram's own in-app payment unit, and a Stars purchase is not an on-chain TON transaction (iTechGuides, 2026). The link to TON runs through payouts: the TON Foundation states that Telegram pays Mini App developers and channel owners their Stars and advertising revenue in Toncoin, now called Gram (TON Foundation, 2025). A user buying a digital gift with Stars therefore holds no coin.

?Does Telegram's role as largest validator make TON centralized?

It concentrates influence, though validators still vote on protocol parameters on-chain. Blockworks notes that Telegram's May 2026 takeover of the steward and largest-validator roles concentrated protocol influence in one corporate entity ↗ (Blockworks, 2026), and Cointelegraph reported that Telegram had not disclosed its stake (Cointelegraph, 2026). Catchain 2.0 activation needed support from at least 75% of validators by stake weight, so no single holder below that share can pass changes alone (Gram of TON channel, 2026).

References / Sources