Gram (prev. Toncoin) (GRAM)

Pavel Durov bought Plush Pepe #834 for 7,500 $GRAM on TON. 🐸

Then things got interesting...

@ton_blockchain joked that he should gift it to a Telegram intern as a bonus.

Hours later, Durov transferred the ~$12K NFT to Adler Toberg - a designer working on Telegram’s interface and gift system.

As Telegram expands its digital collectibles ecosystem, demand for TON NFTs appears to be growing alongside it.

$GRAM to $TON, and now back to $GRAM

This isn't just a rebrand. It's the market being reminded of the one thing that actually matters here: the massive user base @telegram already sits on

Quick history first

The story is messier than most people remember. In October 2019, the SEC sued Telegram, claiming the $GRAM token sale was an unregistered securities offering. After a long legal fight, Telegram's blockchain project was forced to shut down in 2020. They settled with the SEC, paid an $18.5M fine, returned roughly $1.2B to investors, and walked away from the project entirely

In 2021, a community led by Anatoliy Makosov and Kirill Emelyanenko kept it alive through an initiative called Newton. By May 2021, they formed the $TON Foundation, launched $TON Mainnet, and renamed it from Telegram Open Network to The Open Network

Now fast forward to 2026

In my view, bringing the $GRAM brand back isn't nostalgia for the early days. It's a reminder of something most people forgot:

$TON's biggest investment thesis was never the blockchain. It was always Telegram

Look at the numbers

Telegram today:
- 1B+ monthly active users
- 500M+ daily active users

TON, based on latest data:
- 53.75M wallets activated
- 1.79M monthly active wallets
- 148K daily active wallets

Put those side by side and the gap is staggering. TON's monthly active wallets are about 0.18% of Telegram's MAU. Every wallet ever created adds up to roughly 5.4% of Telegram's user base

Which leads to a very simple question

What happens if $GRAM converts even 1%, 5%, or 10% of Telegram's billion users into on-chain users? What happens if $GRAM opens the door wider for outside developers to build on Telegram Mini Apps for an audience measured in billions?

If even one of those scenarios plays out, what the market is pricing today might only reflect a tiny slice of the actual opportunity ahead

So the real question is this: is the market pricing $GRAM on what it is right now, or is it underpricing what a billion-user Telegram pipeline could become?

All in on the-open-network:native

It’ll make sense soon. https://t.co/4Z0SyGllEz