The custodial Wallet bot has been renamed Walt and demoted to trading and yield, which leaves self-custody as the default for an audience that never went looking for it.
Pavel Durov announced on 31 August that a non-custodial Gram wallet is live inside Telegram for an initial group of users, with access widening to the app's billion-plus accounts over the next couple of weeks. The wallet is built on the MyTonWallet engine and secured by a 24-word recovery phrase.
That last detail is the whole story. Telegram holds no keys, cannot freeze a balance and cannot restore an account. Lose the phrase and the money is gone, with no support ticket that changes the outcome. Telegram has not reduced its custody risk here so much as transferred it wholesale to people who did not ask for it and, in most cases, have never managed a private key in their lives.
Every large self-custody wallet population until now has been self-selecting. Someone installs MetaMask or Phantom because they already intend to hold crypto, and the friction of setup filters out anyone who does not. Telegram inverts that filter. The wallet arrives inside an app people already have open for reasons that have nothing to do with money, and the seed phrase is presented to a user base that includes a very large number of people whose threat model is a relative asking for their PIN.
The technical arrangement is more careful than the rollout timeline suggests. TON validators have approved the wallet's smart contracts, which allows Telegram to ship upgrades without asking users to migrate funds to new addresses. Migrations are where wallet users get lost and where phishing thrives, so removing that step is a real improvement. It also concentrates something: an upgradeable contract is only as trustworthy as the process that authorises the upgrade, and that process now sits with validators rather than with each individual holder.
Alongside the launch, the old "Wallet in Telegram" bot has been renamed Walt and repositioned as a multi-chain financial platform. Payments and transfers move to Gram Wallet. Active trading, yield products and derivatives stay with Walt, which remains reachable through Telegram search rather than being built into the interface. The arrangement of the past several years has been reversed: the custodial venue is now the thing you have to go and find, and self-custody is what you get by default.
The token itself carries some history. Gram was renamed from Toncoin on 15 June following a community vote held between 1 and 8 June that passed with 81.22% support, a one-for-one rebrand requiring no action from holders. The name is a deliberate callback. Telegram raised $1.7 billion in 2018 selling rights to a token called Gram, was sued by the SEC in 2019 over the offering, abandoned the project in 2020 and paid an $18.5 million penalty while returning most of the money. Six years later the name is attached to a wallet Telegram ships itself, for a network it does not formally control.
Markets liked it. GRAM rose roughly 8% to around $1.45 on the announcement with trading volume up about 168% to some $119.6 million, according to crypto.news; CoinMarketCap's quote for the same period was lower, at $1.32, so treat the exact level with caution. The direction is not in dispute.
The obvious hazard is phishing, and it is not hypothetical. A seed phrase living in the same application as unsolicited messages from strangers is a target of a kind the hardware wallet industry has spent a decade failing to fully defend. This site has covered a Ledger firmware flaw that let an application display one transaction while signing another, a Metabase bug at Trezor's shipping partner that exposed 13,689 buyers, and a Coldcard exploit whose losses have climbed to 1,367 bitcoin. Those were products sold to people who had already decided security mattered enough to pay for it.
Nor is a wallet's survival guaranteed by the size of the company behind it. Ctrl Wallet went export-only six weeks after its Cardano exploit, leaving users to move funds elsewhere on their own schedule. Telegram's version has the advantage of validator-approved upgradeability, which means it can be patched rather than retired. Whether it gets patched quickly is a question of staffing, and Telegram has never been a large company relative to its user count.
Telegram has published no figure for how many accounts have the wallet today, and no date for when the rest will get it.
