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Six years after regulators forced Telegram to walk away from its own blockchain, the company is back. And it wants you to remember what this was always supposed to be called.
There’s a particular kind of satisfaction that comes with returning to an unfinished project with better footing than you had the first time. Pavel Durov seems to know that feeling well.
On June 1, 2026, the CEO and founder of Telegram posted a message to his official channel that landed like a statement of intent. Toncoin, the native token of The Open Network, is getting a new name. Or rather, it’s getting its original name back.
It will be called Gram.
“Gram is the original name of the TON currency in the first whitepaper,” Durov wrote in his announcement. “We are returning to our roots and starting a new chapter. This rebranding will pave the way for the next steps.”
For anyone who has followed Telegram’s complicated, decade-long relationship with blockchain technology, that sentence carries a lot of history inside it.
The Name That Regulators Erased
To understand why the name Gram means something, you have to go back to 2018, when Telegram ran one of the largest initial coin offerings in crypto history, raising approximately $1.7 billion from private investors to fund a project called the Telegram Open Network. The native token for that network was called Gram. The vision was enormous: a blockchain fast enough to handle the transaction volume of a global messaging app with hundreds of millions of users, integrated directly into Telegram’s ecosystem, making payments and decentralized applications accessible to ordinary people at a scale that existing chains couldn’t match.
Then the Securities and Exchange Commission stepped in.
In October 2019, just weeks before the network was set to launch, the SEC filed an emergency action against Telegram, arguing that the Gram token constituted an unregistered securities offering. Telegram pushed back in court but ultimately couldn’t win the fight. In May 2020, the company agreed to return $1.2 billion to investors, pay an $18.5 million civil penalty, and permanently shelve the project. The name Gram, along with the network it was supposed to power, was buried.
Telegram walked away. But the technology didn’t disappear.
The Community That Kept It Alive
After Telegram’s exit in 2020, a loose coalition of independent developers picked up the codebase and kept building. They relaunched the project under the name The Open Network, rebranding the chain as TON and its native token as Toncoin. For years, the project operated at arm’s length from Telegram, which was careful to maintain legal distance from a network it had been forced to abandon.
But that distance started closing in 2022, when Telegram began integrating TON infrastructure into its app. Wallet features, payment tools, and mini-app capabilities built on TON began appearing inside Telegram’s interface, quietly expanding the network’s utility and user base without requiring Telegram to formally endorse it.
Then, in May 2026, Durov made the distance official. He announced that Telegram would step in as the primary driver of the TON network, replacing the TON Foundation in that role and becoming the largest validator on the chain. It was a structural consolidation that few people in the ecosystem seemed surprised by, given how deeply Telegram’s product roadmap and TON’s infrastructure had already become intertwined.
The Gram rebranding, announced just weeks later, is the logical continuation of that consolidation. It’s not just a name change. It’s Telegram planting a flag and saying: this is ours again.
“Make TON Great Again”
Durov described the rebranding effort under a phrase he called “Make TON Great Again” — a slogan that’s partly playful, partly pointed. The reference to the network’s original ambitions isn’t subtle. Telegram is signaling that the community-run years, while valuable, were always a chapter in a longer story rather than the final destination.
The rebranding is expected to take approximately three weeks to complete. The network itself will retain the TON branding. It’s specifically the token — the currency that sits at the center of the ecosystem’s economic activity — that will carry the Gram name going forward.
This distinction matters for practical reasons. Exchanges, wallets, and data platforms that currently list the asset under the ticker TON will need to update their infrastructure. The transition period will require coordination across a wide range of services, many of which have built user interfaces, price feeds, and trading pairs around the existing branding. A three-week timeline for a rebranding of this scale is aggressive but not unprecedented in the crypto industry.
Technical Upgrades Running in Parallel
The rebranding isn’t happening in isolation. Alongside the name change, the TON network has been rolling out a set of technical improvements that suggest Telegram is preparing the infrastructure for significantly higher usage.
Transaction fees on the network have been cut, making it cheaper for users and developers to interact with the chain. Block production speeds have also been increased, meaning the network can process transactions faster than before. These are the kinds of changes that matter most when a platform is trying to move from niche adoption to mainstream scale — the moment when the user experience has to hold up under real demand rather than controlled conditions.
For Telegram, scale is never an abstract aspiration. The app already has over a billion registered users and hundreds of millions of active ones. If even a small fraction of that user base starts regularly transacting in Gram through Telegram’s interface, the network will need to handle volume that most blockchains have never been tested against. The fee cuts and speed improvements look less like incremental optimization and more like preparation for that scenario.
Durov’s Return to the Original Vision
There’s something worth sitting with in the specific language Durov chose for this announcement.
He didn’t say Telegram was launching a new initiative. He said the company was “returning to our roots.” He didn’t describe the rebranding as a strategic pivot. He framed it as starting a new chapter after going back to the beginning.
That framing is deliberate. It positions everything that happened between 2020 and now — the SEC settlement, Telegram’s retreat, the community-led years under the TON Foundation — as a detour rather than a defeat. The original vision, Durov seems to be saying, was always sound. The circumstances that interrupted it have changed. The name that was taken away is being reclaimed.
Whether the market agrees with that reading will depend on what comes next. Durov promised that the rebranding would “pave the way for the next steps,” without specifying what those steps are. That ambiguity is partly by design. Announcements like this are meant to build anticipation, not answer every question at once.
What’s already clear is that the trajectory Telegram has been on since early 2026 — asserting greater control over the TON ecosystem, consolidating validator power, cutting fees, and now restoring the original token name — points toward a company that intends to make its blockchain ambitions central to its product strategy in a way it previously couldn’t, or wouldn’t, commit to.
The name Gram was buried once because a regulator decided it had to be. It’s back now because the company that created it decided it was time.
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