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Gram Wallet in Telegram: 700,000 new wallets, what users should know
Telegram's built-in Gram wallet added 700,000 wallets in two days. How it works, how many are really used, and what to check if you have one.
Telegram now has a crypto wallet built into the app. Pavel Durov says more than 700,000 self-custodial wallets were created on Telegram in 48 hours, between 8 and 9 November 2026. The wallet holds Gram, the coin of The Open Network (TON) that used to be called Toncoin, and Telegram collectibles such as gifts and usernames. If someone has sent you Grams recently, you may already have one.
What happened
On 9 November Durov posted that "700K+ self-custodial wallets" had been created on Telegram in the previous two days. A dashboard cited by crypto.news counted 714,844 registrations over those two days, 329,952 of them on 9 November alone. By the next day Bitcoin.com News counted more than 930,000 new wallets in the run, and nearly 2.85 million in total.
The rollout itself has been slow. Telegram announced the wallet integration in July, opened it to a limited group at the end of August and widened access on 9 October. The wallet menu only shows up once Telegram enables it for your account, so not everyone sees it yet.
How the Gram wallet in Telegram works
The main trick is in Durov's own words: "a wallet activates the moment someone receives Grams." You don't have to set anything up first. A friend sends you Gram in a chat, and you have a wallet. That is why the numbers jumped so fast: one person sending coins to ten friends makes ten wallets.
- What it holds: Gram, plus Telegram collectibles (gifts, collectible usernames). According to Bitcoin.com News, the underlying contract can also receive other tokens issued on TON.
- Custody: Durov and Telegram call the wallets self-custodial, which means Telegram is not supposed to hold your coins for you.
- The coin: Toncoin was renamed Gram in June 2026 after a community vote with 81.22% support. Balances, addresses and staking positions carried over unchanged. Nothing to swap or claim.
- Upgrades: Durov says TON validators approved the wallet's smart contract so that future upgrades won't force users to migrate their funds.
Created is not the same as used
The headline number counts wallets that exist, not wallets people use. Bitcoin.com News checked GRAM Explorer and found about 178,000 wallets with any balance, roughly 6% of those opened. Together they held about 1.73 million Gram, around 9.7 Gram (about 11 dollars) per funded wallet. On 9 November Telegram wallets made more than 675,000 on-chain transactions, 59% more than the day before.
Against more than a billion monthly Telegram users, that is still a small share. Bitcoin.com News puts it under 0.29%. Wallets that appear because a friend sent you a few coins are a soft kind of adoption. The real test is whether people keep using them to pay each other.
If you have one: what to check
A wallet that switches itself on when money arrives is convenient. It also means millions of people now hold crypto without ever deciding to. A few things are worth doing before you keep more than pocket money in it:
- Find out how recovery works. Self-custody means nobody can undo your mistakes. Open the wallet's settings and see how you would get your funds back on a new phone. If there is a recovery phrase, write it down on paper and keep it offline.
- Lock your Telegram account. Your wallet now lives inside your messenger. Turn on two-step verification (a cloud password) and check the list of active sessions.
- Expect scams. New money in a chat app attracts people who write "support" messages, send fake "claim your Gram" links or ask you to "verify" your wallet. Real support will never ask for your recovery phrase.
- Know what you are holding. Gram is a volatile coin. Treat it like cash in a jacket pocket, not like savings.
Exchange and server hacks have been in the news a lot this autumn, from the Binance hack to a string of Lightning security fixes. The lesson is the same for a Telegram wallet: the more convenient the tool, the more it pays to know how it fails.
Why it matters
Most crypto wallets ask you to install an app, write down 24 words and buy coins on an exchange before you can do anything. Telegram has turned that around: the wallet sits in an app people already use every day, and it appears when someone pays you. If even a small slice of Telegram users start sending Gram the way they send stickers, TON gets a user base no other chain has.
The open questions are the usual ones. Telegram now plays a central role on TON. In May it said it would take over from the TON Foundation as the chain's main driving force and become its largest validator, which raised centralisation worries. And a self-custodial wallet is only as good as the backup its users actually make.
At ZOLAK we take Bitcoin over Lightning at the ZOLAK crypto bar. Payments that feel like sending a message are the right idea. How Telegram's version holds up when millions of new users lose phones, get phished and forget passwords is what we will be watching.
Not financial advice.