Pavel Durov Renames Toncoin to Gram

Pavel Durov announced that Toncoin, the native currency of the TON blockchain, will be renamed Gram (GRAM). TON will remain the name of the blockchain. The renaming begins a roughly three-week transition.

Durov framed the change as a return to earlier branding and posted, “We’re returning to our roots — and starting a new chapter.” He described the renaming as step four of seven in his “Make TON Great Again” roadmap.

The transition does not require a token swap or technical migration. Users’ balances, active stakes and DeFi contracts will remain intact, and current account balances will automatically adopt the GRAM ticker once the rollout completes.

Earlier items in the roadmap included Catchain 2.0, which shortened finality times to sub-second levels, and a fee reduction that lowered transaction costs roughly sixfold. Telegram has increased its validation activity and is the largest validator on TON, with millions of tokens staked to its nodes.

Market activity responded to Durov’s takeover-related announcements in May, when TON prices rose from about $1.30 to peaks near $2.80 amid heavy trading and increased staking inflows.

Telegram plans development and product updates alongside the rebrand, including upgrades to developer tools, a redesigned ton.org site, improvements to TON Pay and new Bitcoin liquidity bridges. The company also said GRAM could be used in Mini Apps, payments and creator monetization features inside Telegram.

Gram was the token name in Telegram’s original 2018 whitepaper. Telegram raised about $1.7 billion in private token sales for that effort before the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission challenged the offering in 2020. Telegram halted the project, refunded investors and published the code. That code was later used by the community to relaunch the network under the TON Foundation as Toncoin.

Developers and service providers will monitor the coming weeks for details on ticker updates, wallet support and user-interface changes in Telegram and third-party wallets. For now, holders should see only the token name change on balances, with no interruption to staking or existing DeFi positions during the announced transition.