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Points of Focus
- Durov confirmed Gram Wallet is live for a select group of Telegram users.
- Whether the wallet is fully non-custodial still needs independent confirmation.
- Telegram’s growing TON control raises a governance question alongside the launch.
Pavel Durov confirmed on Tuesday that Gram Wallet is live for an initial group of Telegram users, with the platform’s more than 1 billion users to follow gradually over the coming weeks.
🚨HUGE: Telegram officially begins rolling out the Gram Wallet to ONE BILLION users.
The wallet is now live for a select group, with Durov saying the full rollout reaches "our billion+ users over the next couple of weeks."
It's self-custodial, zero-fee, and built directly into… pic.twitter.com/Sro83PtvVs
— Coin Bureau (@coinbureau) August 31, 2026
The announcement lands on the “summer launch” timeline Durov first teased in July and credits validators directly: “Thanks to the validators who approved the smart contract that powers it, future upgrades of the wallet won’t require painful migrations.”
What Durov actually announced today
Gram Wallet ships as a built-in feature of the main Telegram client rather than a separate app or bot.
Durov framed it as one of several steps toward making non-custodial wallets usable at real scale, distinct from Telegram’s existing Wallet bot, a custodial product operated by third-party developer The Open Platform that already serves around 150 million registered users.
Whether Gram Wallet is fully non-custodial is still unconfirmed
The claim worth testing directly is “non-custodial” itself.
Reporting from CoinMarketCap Academy, published in the weeks after Durov’s original July tease, described a split-key recovery model in which regaining access to a lost wallet depended on control of the user’s Telegram account and email inbox, a materially different risk than true self-custody since anyone holding those two things could effectively control the wallet regardless of who technically held the keys.
Tuesday’s launch is separately described as using a standard 24-word recovery phrase instead, though that specific detail traces to a single outlet not yet independently confirmed elsewhere.
Whether this reflects a genuine design change from the split-key model or simply a clearer account of a previously ambiguous system is not yet settled, and the distinction matters directly: It determines whether losing access to a Gram Wallet requires anything Telegram itself can influence or nothing at all.
Gram Wallet’s launch sits inside a larger TON governance shift
The rollout also sits inside a longer governance arc.
The Open Network’s (TON) native token reverted from Toncoin back to Gram in June, reviving the name from Telegram’s original 2018 blockchain project, which raised $1.7 billion before Telegram formally exited the network in 2020 amid a dispute with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, handing development to the independent TON Foundation.
The claim that Telegram has since reasserted influence over the network traces specifically to Durov’s statements that Telegram became TON’s largest validator and that the foundation no longer drives the project’s direction, rather than to independent confirmation, which is hard to attribute precisely since Durov has a direct interest in how this framing lands.
What Gram Wallet’s zero-fee promise still hasn’t explained
Durov’s promised zero-fee transactions carry no publicly disclosed funding mechanism as of Tuesday’s announcement, an open question rather than a confirmed feature.
The wallet rollout is also reportedly the fourth of seven planned steps in a broader roadmap Durov has outlined for the network, with the remaining three still undisclosed.
What to verify before treating Gram Wallet as fully non-custodial
None of this diminishes the scale of what’s shipping: A wallet built into an app used by more than 1 billion people is a genuine distribution event regardless of how the recovery mechanics resolve.
But the specific claim carrying the most weight in Durov’s own framing — that this wallet puts full control in users’ hands — is exactly the detail that needs direct confirmation against Telegram’s own technical documentation before it should be repeated as settled fact.
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