What did Pavel Durov announce?
Pavel Durov, Telegram's founder and CEO, wrote on his Telegram channel on Monday, June 1, that TON's native currency is becoming Gram.
The transition will take around three weeks, he said. TON will remain the name of the blockchain.
So the change is about the currency name, not the network name. Toncoin becomes Gram, while the TON network stays TON.
TON itself also has had two lives.
- TON originally stood for Telegram Open Network, the blockchain project described in a 2019 whitepaper by Nikolai Durov, Telegram's co-founder and Pavel Durov's brother.
- After Telegram stepped away from the project following its U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission case, the community-run version became known as The Open Network, or TON.
Why call it Gram again?
Gram wasn't a new name Durov pulled out of nowhere. It was the original name of the coin in Telegram's crypto plan, and the 2019 TON whitepaper had a whole appendix called "The TON Coin, or the Gram."
That appendix described Gram as the blockchain's main cryptocurrency, used for validator deposits, transaction fees, gas payments and storage payments. It also set out the original supply at 5 billion Grams and described smaller units such as nanograms.
Durov didn't explain in the post why the token was originally named Gram, and the whitepaper doesn't appear to spell that out either. But the branding connection was always hard to miss.
Gram visually sits inside Telegram, and the name tied the token directly to the messaging app before the SEC case forced Telegram to drop the project.
Why is this happening now?
Durov hasn't clearly explained why Telegram is bringing back the Gram name now.
But the timing is hard to separate from two bigger changes:
- Durov said in early May that Telegram would replace the TON Foundation, the non-profit group that has supported TON's ecosystem, as the blockchain's main driving force and became its largest validator.
- The U.S. regulatory backdrop looks different from the one that killed the original Gram launch.
The SEC sued Telegram in October 2019, saying its $1.7 billion Gram sale was an unregistered securities offering. Telegram settled in 2020, agreed to return more than $1.2 billion to investors and paid an $18.5 million penalty.
Gary Gensler, the former SEC chair closely associated with aggressive crypto enforcement during the Biden administration, left the agency in January 2025.
Under President Donald Trump, the SEC later moved in a more crypto-friendly direction under Chair Paul Atkins.