Hope for the best — prepare for the wallet

Pavel Durov broke a months-long silence on TON with a big announcement: this summer, Telegram plans "the largest" launch of a non-custodial crypto wallet. The Gram Wallet is promised to be “brought into all Telegram apps," putting crypto access in the hands of a billion-plus user base. Sounds ambitious — let's try to figure out what it actually means.

Right now, the frontrunner for integration looks like the Gram Wallet by My Wallet — wallet.ton.org already points there. But the team told RBC Crypto that their app would only be an "extended version of the future built-in Telegram wallet." How exactly this will work in practice is still murky, but it's clear Telegram is building something of its own.

What's interesting is that Telegram has been down this road before. Back in 2019, a Gram wallet showed up in an alpha client build, complete with its own dedicated Terms of Service still live on Telegram's website. The desktop wallet source code also remains on GitHub. In a sense, this new announcement brings us full circle to a product Telegram was about to ship before Telegram Open Network was shut down.

That said, there's reason to keep expectations in check. Back in late 2022, Durov promised a suite of decentralized tools — including a non-custodial wallet and a DEX. Nearly four years later, none of that has reached users. And it's unlikely the Telegram team has been quietly building a new wallet this whole time.

As we noted in our piece on attention economics, Telegram rarely runs multiple major tracks in parallel for years. The team grabs onto a narrative and hyperfocuses on it for a while. So it's entirely possible that serious Gram Wallet development is only starting now — if it starts at all — after this public announcement.

So for now, we’re not holding our breath for anything groundbreaking. The most likely outcome is that Telegram embeds a basic Gram wallet into the messenger — roughly the same thing it was planning to ship six years ago. That alone would still be a big deal, but as always, the devil's in the details. We'll see what Gram Wallet actually looks like on release.

@thedailyton