Gram GRAM

The project's site describes TON as a network with dynamic sharding, a block time of about 0.4 seconds and finality in about 0.6 seconds. Sharding lets the network split its workload across parallel chains as activity grows. According to the project's site, Gram was initially distributed through Proof-of-Work mining, and the site links to a post announcing that this mining phase has ended.

According to the project's site, Telegram users can hold Gram in a non-custodial wallet that the Telegram team has built into the messenger. With it they can send funds to each other and use bots and mini-apps. The site also says Gram can buy Telegram Stars and prepay Stars and Premium giveaways, and that Telegram advertising revenue can be paid out in Gram. Telegram gifts can be turned into NFTs on TON, and Telegram usernames and collectible numbers are secured on the TON blockchain, the project says.

The name Gram goes back to January 2018, when Telegram began selling Gram tokens to fund the Telegram Open Network. The sale raised about US$1.7 billion in two private rounds under SAFT agreements. Wikipedia names Nikolai Durov, a Telegram co-founder, as TON's original developer; other accounts credit both Pavel and Nikolai Durov. On October 3, 2019, Telegram announced that TON and Gram would launch by the end of that month. Later in October 2019, the US Securities and Exchange Commission obtained a temporary restraining order that stopped the Telegram-led launch.

After a court ruling in the SEC case, Pavel Durov said on May 12, 2020 that Telegram had stopped all work on TON. On June 10, 2020, Telegram settled with the SEC, agreeing to return about US$1.22 billion to investors and to pay an US$18.5 million penalty. Development then passed to the open-source community, known as NewTON, which continued from the public code. According to an exchange explainer, a vote in May 2021 renamed the group The Open Network (TON) Foundation. The project's site now describes TON as a blockchain developed by Telegram and the open-source community.

On June 1, 2026, Pavel Durov announced that the native coin of the TON network would return to the name Gram, the name used in the original white paper. A TON Vote proposal was launched at about the same time, and the poll ran from June 1 to June 8, 2026. According to AMBCrypto, the finalized governance proposal passed with 81.22% of participating voting power in favour, and the coin was renamed Gram with the ticker GRAM. The change took effect at 12:00 UTC on June 15, 2026.

No. The rename changed only the name: there was no swap, claim or migration, and existing balances became Gram automatically at the same addresses. According to KuCoin's report of the official notice, any claim that coins had to be migrated or exchanged for GRAM is fraudulent. The rename also brought a new logo. The network itself keeps the name The Open Network (TON); only the coin's name and ticker changed. According to AMBCrypto, projects were encouraged to show the coin as Gram with its previous name in brackets during a three-month transition window. A crypto.news guide describes the rename as the fourth step of Pavel Durov's seven-step "Make TON Great Again" roadmap.