Telegram Plans Fee-Free Gram Wallet for Over a Billion Users This Summer

Telegram wants to hand a non-custodial crypto wallet to more than a billion people. Pavel Durov said Wednesday that the app will roll out a native Gram wallet this summer, letting users send crypto to their contacts instantly and without fees. He called it the "largest rollout of a non-custodial crypto wallet in human history." He also left most of the important details blank.

What Durov didn't say

No release date. No list of supported assets. No account of how a fee-free service covers network costs. Non-custodial means users hold their own keys instead of trusting Telegram with their coins, and building the wallet into the chat app removes the usual step of downloading something separate before sending funds. Telegram reported more than 1 billion monthly active users in 2025. Even a thin uptake rate would push millions of people into self-custody for the first time. The company has not said whether the wallet arrives worldwide at once or in phases, nor explained how account recovery and security would work, or whether some services will require identity checks.

The name comes with baggage

The wallet follows TON's decision to rename Toncoin as Gram, reviving the label from Telegram's 2018 white paper. The blockchain itself keeps the name The Open Network. The token transition was set to take about three weeks and required no action from holders, and Gram rose as much as 19% to $2.21 after Durov disclosed the change. That name carries a legal record. Telegram raised $1.7 billion for its first blockchain project, then the SEC sued in 2019 over what it called an unregistered securities offering. A 2020 settlement had Telegram return more than $1.2 billion to investors and pay an $18.5 million penalty before it walked away, leaving independent developers to carry the open-source code into what became TON.

Telegram has since folded the network back in. Ad buys can be paid in the token, creators can take crypto payments, and Durov said in 2025 that venture firms including Sequoia Capital and Benchmark had put more than $400 million into Toncoin.

Wallets for the bots too

The person-to-person wallet is not the only payment tool TON is building inside Telegram. On April 28, TON Tech introduced an Agentic Wallets standard that, as of May, lets AI agents running through Telegram bots control user-funded wallets and carry out limited actions like transfers, swaps, and DeFi interactions. TON Tech describes them as "self-custody wallets designed for autonomous AI agents." The owner funds a separate on-chain wallet for the agent, sets a spending budget, and can withdraw the balance or cut off access at any point, with no intermediary holding the money. Whether the summer wallet will connect to any of this, Telegram has not said.