Pavel Durov is promising something no wallet maker has ever had the distribution to attempt: self-custody crypto as a default feature of an app with more than a billion monthly users. The Telegram founder announced on X on July 21 that a native, non-custodial wallet for Gram — the token formerly known as Toncoin — will roll out to “every Telegram app” this summer, with instant, zero-fee transactions attached. He called it “the largest rollout of a non-custodial crypto wallet in human history.”
On raw numbers, the claim is hard to argue with. MetaMask, the most widely used self-custody wallet in crypto, counts its users in the tens of millions. Telegram counts monthly actives north of one billion. Nothing in the industry has ever launched self-custody at that scale on day one — which is exactly why the details Durov left out matter as much as the ones he gave.
Native and non-custodial is the actual news
Telegram users can already touch crypto through @wallet, the in-app bot with more than 150 million registered users. But @wallet is built and operated by The Open Platform — a separate company, not Telegram itself — and it defaults to custodial mode, meaning someone else holds the keys unless a user deliberately switches to its self-custody layer, as Decrypt reported.
Durov’s announcement flips both of those properties. The new wallet is native — baked into every version of the app rather than a bot users have to find and activate — and non-custodial from the start, so keys belong to the user. Nobody can freeze the funds, seize them, or block a transfer without the holder’s permission. That is a materially different product from @wallet, not an upgrade to it, and Telegram has not said whether the two will coexist or one will absorb the other.
Gram bounced 7%, but July has been brutal
The market’s reaction was quick and modest. Gram climbed roughly 7% on the news, moving back above $1.52 at around a $4.18 billion market cap after trading near $1.36 the day before. Context cuts the enthusiasm down: the token had slid about 25% through most of July, so the announcement clawed back only part of a bad month.
The longer view is harsher still. Gram’s all-time high of $8.25 dates to June 2024 and the tap-to-earn gaming craze. Even the more recent peak — $2.89 in May 2026, set when Telegram first announced it was retaking the network — would require an 88% rally from current prices. A billion-user distribution deal is a real catalyst, but the chart says traders have been burned before and are pricing this one in cautiously.
The 2018 ghost this launch has to outrun
There is a reason Durov frames this project as a restoration. Telegram created the original TON network in 2018 and raised $1.7 billion for a token it planned to call Gram — until the SEC sued, arguing the tokens were unregistered securities. Telegram settled in 2020, returned $1.2 billion to investors, paid an $18.5 million penalty, and abandoned the project. Community developers kept the chain alive as Toncoin until Durov retook the reins this year.
The name itself only came back in June, when the rebrand from Toncoin to Gram passed with 81% of a community vote — part of what Durov calls “Make TON Great Again.” The technical groundwork has been laid in public too: an April network upgrade made the chain 10x faster with sub-second transactions, which Durov described as step one of seven, with a 6x fee cut named as the next.
What “this summer” leaves unanswered
The open questions are not small. Telegram has not said which assets the wallet will support beyond Gram, how key management will work for hundreds of millions of people who have never written down a seed phrase, or what happens to @wallet’s 150 million registered users. And “this summer” is the only timeline on offer — a window that closes in roughly two months.
Self-custody at messaging-app scale is either crypto’s biggest onboarding event ever or its biggest support nightmare, and the difference comes down to execution details Telegram has not shown yet. The promise is dated; the product is not. Watch what actually ships in the app before the leaves turn.
