Gram (prev. Toncoin) (TON) Price — Buy & Swap TON

The story behind Gram (prev. Toncoin)

Telegram itself designed the network back in 2018, hoping to build a blockchain that hundreds of millions of messaging users could tap into without ever leaving the app. The plan collapsed in 2020 after an SEC enforcement action forced Telegram to abandon it, and an independent community picked up the code and relaunched it as The Open Network rather than letting the project die.

Telegram later came back around and embraced TON as its blockchain partner, and mini-app games such as Notcoin and Hamster Kombat pulled tens of millions of new users on-chain during 2024, giving the network a distribution advantage almost no other Layer-1 can claim.

What TON is used for

You would use TON, or Gram as it now appears in Telegram's own interface, to pay transaction fees and to stake with validators who secure the network. Inside Telegram itself it covers wallet transfers, mini-app payments, username auctions, and the TON DNS and storage services that let apps run partly inside the messenger rather than requiring you to open a browser at all.

Gram (prev. Toncoin) in the market today

TON's access to Telegram's enormous existing user base is unmatched among Layer-1 blockchains, which is precisely why it grew so fast. The honest caveat is that activity remains heavily concentrated in games and airdrop campaigns rather than the kind of sustained DeFi usage that anchors other large chains, leaving how many of those users stick around once the incentives fade as a genuinely open question.

How to buy or swap TON

1. Pick TON as the asset you want to receive.
2. Choose what you're paying with — crypto or a fiat card.
3. Monivo compares every connected exchange and routes your order to the best available rate.
4. Paste your wallet address and confirm — funds arrive in minutes.

Why Gram (prev. Toncoin) exists at all

In early 2018 Telegram raised roughly $1.7 billion from a small group of purchasers to build a blockchain that would sit alongside a messaging app with hundreds of millions of users. The technical premise was sharding at a scale no live network had attempted: a hierarchy of workchains and shardchains that could split further as demand grew.

The legal premise was the problem. The sale was structured as future-delivery agreements with sophisticated investors, and US regulators treated the arrangement as part of an unregistered securities distribution.

The people behind it

The design work is credited to Nikolai Durov, a mathematician, with Pavel Durov leading Telegram. The architecture — an actor model where contracts message each other asynchronously across shards — reflects a theoretical ambition rather than an incremental improvement on Ethereum.

After Telegram withdrew, the code was picked up by independent developers who kept the architecture and the name and continued the network as The Open Network. The company's later re-engagement through an in-app wallet is a commercial relationship rather than a return to control.

The original bet

The bet was that sharding could be made general. Most scaling designs shard data and keep execution simple; TON shards both, and expects chains to split and merge dynamically with load. Contracts communicate by passing messages asynchronously, more like independent actors than like functions calling each other.

The cost is a programming model that does not behave like Ethereum's. Synchronous composability — the property that lets one contract call another and see the result within the same transaction — is not available in the same way, and developers have to design around that.

The turning point

On 11 October 2019 the SEC sought an emergency injunction to stop the distribution of Gram tokens. On 24 March 2020 the court granted a preliminary injunction, and on 26 June 2020 the matter settled: Telegram agreed to return $1.224 billion to purchasers, pay an $18.5 million penalty, and give the regulator advance notice of future digital-asset issuances for three years.

Telegram abandoned the project. The code, already open source, survived it.

A detail most summaries leave out

The settlement figure is smaller than the amount raised for a specific reason: some purchasers outside the United States chose not to take their money back and converted their claims into loans to the company instead. The disgorgement therefore covered the unspent remainder rather than the full raise — investors who believed in the app, not the token, effectively stayed in.

The question that is still open

The independence question has never been cleanly answered. TON is developed by a separate foundation and community, yet its most valuable distribution channel is the messaging app built by the people who designed it. Where a legally mandated separation ends and a commercial partnership begins is a judgement call, and reasonable observers disagree.

What this means when you swap TON

TON addresses look unlike anything on Bitcoin- or Ethereum-derived chains: base64url strings, commonly beginning `EQ` or `UQ`. That prefix is meaningful. It encodes whether the address is bounceable, which determines what happens if the receiving contract rejects the message — funds either return to you or stay at the destination. Wallets normally pick the right form, but pasting a form you copied from elsewhere can change the behaviour.

Two further cautions. TON and TRON are unrelated networks with confusingly similar names, and mixing them up is a genuine deposit error. And some services require a comment or memo field on TON deposits, so check the instructions rather than assuming the address is sufficient.