Telegram replaces TON Foundation as top validator; Toncoin jumps

Telegram has taken the largest validator position on The Open Network after staking about 2.2 million TON, founder Pavel Durov confirmed. Market prices for Toncoin rose more than 100% following the announcement.

The change places Telegram as the primary validator on the chain and increases the company’s stake in network security. Telegram’s action follows a program Durov described to expand the company’s operational role on the network.

Alexander Tobol, chief technology officer at Wallet in Telegram, said the chain was originally developed by Telegram’s team before it became an open-source project and described the validator role as a deeper commitment to the network. He added that transfers, payments and mini-app services inside Telegram could drive on-chain activity. “In such a scenario, TON could potentially become the leading blockchain by number of active wallets thanks to retail usage inside Telegram,” Tobol told reporters.

Recent infrastructure upgrades on TON include the Catchain 2.0 update. Block times shortened from about 2.5 seconds to roughly 400 milliseconds and finality fell from about ten seconds to near one second. The upgrade reduced typical fees by about sixfold to roughly $0.0005 and raised theoretical throughput above 100,000 transactions per second.

Denis Vasin, founder of Storm Trade, described the network’s performance as matching expectations for a high-throughput Layer-1 chain and said the faster finality and lower fees support frequent small-value transactions. “Fast finality and low cost position it for frequent small-value transactions,” Vasin noted.

Telegram has roughly 1 billion users. Direct access to that user base gives the messenger a channel for on-ramps and product integration that can generate regular on-chain activity through bots, payments and mini-apps inside the app.

Staking yields on the network are around 15% annualized. Telegram’s 2.2 million TON stake increases the company’s formal role in validation and network security. Market participants have pushed TON’s price higher in the last trading session, and some observers warned that the price rise reduces the margin for execution errors if transactional activity does not follow the rally.

Analysts and investors said they will watch several indicators in the coming weeks to assess whether the validator change produces sustained economic activity: growth in bot payments and mini-app transactions inside Telegram, rising numbers of active wallets, and steady fee-bearing transactions rather than short-lived speculative flows. A significant pullback in price would test demand under real usage conditions.

Manuel Stotz clarified in a public post that all TON previously sold by Telegram carried four-year vesting. TON began as a Telegram-led project before becoming an open-source blockchain. Whether the validator change leads to steady on-chain usage and a higher market-cap ranking will depend on adoption inside the app and the network’s ability to sustain low fees and high throughput under real-world load.