Adam Back criticizes Telegram’s GRAM inflation

On June 15, 2026, Blockstream CEO Adam Back publicly challenged Telegram founder Pavel Durov after Durov praised Bitcoin as a check on government money expansion. Back replied on X, writing ‘someone is printing GRAM though eh 🙂.’

Pavel Durov has held Bitcoin as a personal reserve for more than a decade. He bought roughly 2,000 BTC in 2013 at an average price near $700 per coin and maintained the position through multiple market cycles. Durov has said those holdings helped fund Telegram during periods when the company lacked other revenue.

Telegram recently rebranded its native token from Toncoin back to Gram, restoring the name that appeared in the project’s 2018 whitepaper. All holdings converted at a 1:1 ratio with no action required from holders, and exchanges updated listings to the GRAM ticker.

GRAM differs from Bitcoin in its supply rules. Bitcoin enforces a 21 million coin cap in protocol code. GRAM has no hard supply ceiling: the network issues new tokens daily as validator rewards, producing an annual inflation rate of roughly 0.3% to 0.6%. Total GRAM supply is currently about 5.2 billion tokens. Long-term supply limits are subject to the network’s governance processes rather than an immutable protocol rule.

Back highlighted the difference between Bitcoin’s fixed issuance schedule and GRAM’s validator-driven emission model. He has argued that Bitcoin’s monetary credibility relies on a fixed, auditable issuance schedule. Earlier in 2026 he rejected a contested fork proposal, arguing that changes to Bitcoin’s core rules create a new asset rather than an upgrade.

The exchange of remarks underscores a technical and philosophical divide in digital-asset discussions: whether a token must have protocol-enforced scarcity to qualify as a long-term store of value, or whether governance-managed issuance is acceptable. The rebrand and the public comments are likely to figure in investor and user assessments of GRAM’s monetary properties relative to Bitcoin.