What is Gram (GRAM)?

The Open Network began as Telegram's own blockchain. The 2018 whitepaper described a token called Gram and raised $1.7bn for it. In 2020 the SEC forced Telegram to abandon the project and return most of the money, and Telegram walked away — formally and completely.

An independent community picked up the open-source code and kept building. The token that emerged was called Toncoin rather than Gram, because Gram was the name attached to the securities action. Over the following years Telegram's involvement quietly returned, first as integration and eventually as endorsement.

The rebrand, and what it signals

On 15 June 2026, after a community vote carried by 81.22%, Toncoin was renamed Gram and its ticker changed from TON to GRAM. Pavel Durov backed it as part of deepening Telegram's role in the network. Only the name, ticker and logo changed — holders needed to do nothing, and no swap or migration was involved.

Read it for what it is. Taking back the name the SEC action was attached to, with the founder's public support, is a statement that the distance Telegram kept from this project is no longer considered necessary. That is a meaningful change in posture, and it does not alter the legal history — it signals a judgement that the history no longer binds.

The technology

TON uses dynamic sharding: rather than a fixed number of shards, the chain splits them when load rises and merges them when it falls. It is an elegant answer to scaling and a complicated one to operate, and it is one of the few sharded architectures running in production.

The part that actually matters commercially is the Telegram integration. A wallet inside the messenger, in front of a user base measured in hundreds of millions, is a distribution channel no other chain has. Mini-apps and in-chat payments reach people who would never install a separate wallet — which is exactly the onboarding problem every other chain is still trying to solve.

• Gas for transactions across the network.
• Staking to validators, which secures the chain.
• Payments inside Telegram — tips, mini-app purchases, transfers between users who never leave the chat.
• Fees for TON DNS and TON Storage, the network's naming and file services.

The distribution argument is genuinely strong and deserves to be taken seriously rather than dismissed as hype: crypto's central problem has always been that using it requires installing something and understanding something. TON's answer is that the thing is already installed. The counter-argument is that in-messenger payments have been tried repeatedly across the industry and adoption has consistently trailed the size of the user base by a wide margin. Having the channel is not the same as converting it.

About 5 billion GRAM, with modest inflation from validator rewards that is partially offset by fee burns. The supply structure is not the interesting part of this asset.

The distribution history is. The original tokens came from early mining before the network was widely known, which left a concentrated holder base, and additional supply sat in reserves tied to the project's Telegram-era history. Concentration is a long-standing and fair criticism of this network, and the rebrand did not change the distribution.

There is also a Nasdaq-listed vehicle, TON Strategy Company, holding the token as a treasury asset in the pattern established by MicroStrategy — another concentrated block, in a listed wrapper.

GRAM is staked by delegating to validators or by running one, which requires a substantial minimum and real infrastructure. Nomination pools let smaller holders participate in a validator's stake.

Rewards come from issuance and fees, at rates that move with total stake. There are lockup periods tied to validation rounds, so exiting is not instant — check the current round structure before committing rather than assuming it behaves like a chain you already know.

Yield products offered inside Telegram wallets are not always protocol staking. Some are custodial products run by a third party, where the yield is that company's promise. The interface makes the two look alike, and they are not.

Telegram dependency is the whole thesis and the whole risk

The network's distinguishing advantage is a messenger it does not control. Telegram is a private company whose founder has faced legal proceedings in Europe, operating in jurisdictions with varying tolerance for encrypted messaging. A change in Telegram's strategy, ownership or legal position is directly a change in this asset's case. Nothing about the rebrand reduces that — it deepens it.

The SEC history has not been relitigated

The 2020 action ended Telegram's involvement and forced the return of most of $1.7bn. Restoring the Gram name is a statement of confidence rather than a legal ruling. The regulatory environment is friendlier than it was, and the history is a fact rather than a resolved matter.

Concentration

Early mining left ownership concentrated, and a Nasdaq-listed treasury vehicle now holds another large block. Concentrated supply moves prices when it moves.

Ecosystem depth

TON's DeFi and developer ecosystem is small relative to its market capitalisation, and building on it means learning an architecture unlike anything else — a different virtual machine, a different asynchronous message-passing model. The Telegram distribution is real; the developer gravity has not followed at the same rate.

Sharding complexity

Dynamic sharding is ambitious and among the few such designs in production. Cross-shard messaging is historically where this class of system fails, and it is asynchronous here, which is harder to reason about for developers and auditors alike.