On June 15, 2026, Toncoin became Gram, reclaiming the name regulators erased in 2020. Here is the full story: what changed, what did not, the six-year history behind it, how Gram works, how to buy it, and whether it is worth owning.
Summary
- Toncoin officially became Gram on June 15 after a community vote approved the return of the token’s original name with 81.22% support.
- The rebrand changed only the token’s name, ticker, and logo, while balances, wallets, staking positions, and network operations remained unchanged.
- Telegram founder Pavel Durov backed the move as part of a broader plan to deepen Telegram’s role in The Open Network and expand Gram’s use across the platform.
Gram is the native cryptocurrency of The Open Network (TON), the blockchain tied to the messaging app Telegram. On June 15, 2026, the token formerly known as Toncoin was officially renamed Gram, and its ticker changed from TON to GRAM after a community vote passed with 81.22% support. The blockchain itself keeps the name The Open Network. Only the token’s name, ticker, and logo changed, and no swap, migration, or action of any kind is required from people who hold it.
That is the simple answer, and for most holders it is the whole answer. But the rename carries a story that runs back nearly a decade, through one of the largest regulatory battles in crypto history, a $1.2 billion refund forced by the US government, and a quiet six-year exile of the very name that returned this month. If you searched “what is Gram” and landed on pages describing a coin worth a fraction of a cent, you found the wrong one, and that confusion is itself part of the story. This guide covers all of it: what Gram is now, how it differs from Toncoin, why the name vanished and came back, who is driving the change, how the token works, how to buy it, and whether it is worth owning.
Gram vs. Toncoin: what actually changed?
The simplest way to understand Gram is to hold it next to Toncoin and mark the differences, because there are fewer than the headlines imply.
Three things changed. The token’s name changed from Toncoin to Gram. Its ticker symbol changed from TON to GRAM, so a trading pair that read TON/USDT now reads GRAM/USDT. And the logo was updated. That is the complete list of what is different. Everything else about the asset is identical to what it was on June 14.
What did not change is far longer, and it is the part that matters for anyone holding the token. The blockchain is still called The Open Network, often shortened to TON; only the currency that runs on it took the new name. Your balance is unchanged: a wallet holding 10 Toncoin holds 10 Gram now, at the same value, in the same wallet, at the same address. There was no token swap, no migration to a new contract, no bridge transfer, and no claim process. Staking positions continue earning as before. Smart contracts, NFTs, Jettons, and decentralized-finance positions all carry over untouched. Transaction history, deposit addresses, and withdrawal addresses are exactly as they were. On exchanges, the changeover was automatic: major venues including KuCoin and MEXC converted balances one-to-one and relabeled their markets, so holders woke up to the new name without lifting a finger.
What makes the change so shallow mechanically is that a rename is a label, not a re-engineering. No supply was created or destroyed, no token economics were altered, and no code that governs how the network runs was rewritten. During a transition period running into late June, many platforms display the asset as “Gram (prev. Toncoin)” to ease the handoff, after which the parenthetical drops away and it is simply Gram. If you understood Toncoin, you already understand Gram, because they are the same asset wearing a new name.
Why Gram disappeared for six years
The name Gram is not new. It is a homecoming, and the reason it had to come home explains a great deal about crypto’s relationship with US regulators.
In 2018, Telegram designed a blockchain it called the Telegram Open Network, and the native token of that network was named Gram. The company raised approximately $1.7 billion by selling Gram tokens to private investors in one of the largest token sales of that era, intending to launch the network and distribute the tokens to its hundreds of millions of users. It never got the chance. In October 2019, the US Securities and Exchange Commission filed an emergency action to halt the project, arguing that the sale of Gram amounted to an unregistered offering of securities under US law. The SEC won a preliminary injunction, and in 2020 Telegram abandoned the project entirely, returning more than $1.2 billion to investors and paying an $18.5 million civil penalty. Gram, as Telegram had envisioned it, was dead before it ever traded.
But the network did not die with it. A group of independent developers, unaffiliated with Telegram in any formal sense, took the open-source code Telegram had published and kept building. They relaunched the project as The Open Network, kept the TON abbreviation, and deliberately renamed the token Toncoin, specifically to distance the community-run network from the Gram name that the SEC had litigated against. That distancing was a survival strategy: carrying the Gram name in 2021 would have meant carrying the legal baggage that killed the original, so the new stewards, organized as the Switzerland-based TON Foundation, chose a clean label and built the network into a functioning blockchain with millions of users, its own ecosystem of apps, and a token that climbed into the top tier of the market.
So Gram did not simply vanish; it was deliberately retired to protect the project that grew out of its ashes. For six years, the name sat unused, a casualty of a regulatory fight, while the network it was meant to power thrived under a different label. The 2026 decision to bring it back is only comprehensible against that history: reclaiming Gram is reclaiming the original vision, now that the people behind the network believe the danger that forced its retirement has passed.
Pavel Durov and “Make TON Great Again”
The rename did not happen in isolation. It is the fourth move in a deliberate campaign led by Telegram’s founder to retake control of the network and bind it to his messaging empire.
Pavel Durov, who co-founded Telegram and built it into a platform with roughly one billion users, spent the years after the SEC settlement at a deliberate distance from The Open Network. That changed in 2026. Beginning in April, Durov started publishing a roadmap on his Telegram channel under the pointed name Make TON Great Again, or MTONGA, a seven-step plan to upgrade the network and tie it directly to Telegram. The first step was a major technical upgrade called Catchain 2.0 that made the network roughly ten times faster, cutting transaction finality to under a second. The second cut transaction fees roughly sixfold, to a fraction of a cent. The third, and most consequential, was Telegram formally replacing the TON Foundation as the network’s primary steward and becoming its largest validator, staking millions of tokens through the company’s own infrastructure and ending years of arm’s-length separation.
Step four is the Gram rename. Coming after the speed, the fee cut, and the validator takeover, it is the branding capstone on a strategic reversal: Telegram, having quietly retreated in 2020, is now openly in command of the network and willing to fly the flag the SEC once tore down. Three further steps in the roadmap remain undisclosed, which means the rename is not an endpoint but a waypoint in an ongoing campaign.
Durov framed the name change as a return to roots, writing that Gram was the original name and that the network was beginning a new chapter, and the symbolism is deliberate. Reviving the name that regulators killed is a statement that Telegram believes the US climate has shifted in crypto’s favor, and that the company is ready to pursue the consumer-payment ambitions it abandoned six years ago, this time from a position of control.
All of the strategic logic rests on a single number: Telegram’s user base, approaching one billion people. The entire point of binding the network tightly to Telegram, upgrading its speed, slashing its fees, and giving its token a name Telegram’s users already recognize, is to convert some meaningful fraction of that audience into people who actually use Gram for payments, apps, and services inside the messenger.
Whether that conversion happens is the open question that hangs over everything, but the rename is unmistakably built to serve it.
How does Gram work?
Underneath the branding, Gram is the working fuel of a live, high-throughput blockchain, and understanding what it does clarifies why it has value at all.
The Open Network is a layer-1 proof-of-stake blockchain, meaning it is a base-layer network secured not by energy-intensive mining but by validators who lock up, or stake, tokens as collateral for the right to process transactions and earn rewards.
Gram is the asset at the center of that system, and it performs several jobs. It pays transaction fees: every transfer, swap, or app interaction on the network costs a small amount of Gram, now a fraction of a cent after the roadmap’s fee cuts. It secures the network through staking: validators stake Gram to participate in consensus, and ordinary holders can delegate their Gram to validators to earn a share of the rewards, which is how the proof-of-stake system stays honest and how the chain produces blocks. And it serves as the settlement and gas asset for everything built on the network, from the ecosystem of mini-apps embedded in Telegram to payments, tipping, and decentralized-finance tools.
Its design is unusually oriented toward consumer scale. Its architecture is built to process high volumes of transactions quickly and cheaply, which is the technical prerequisite for serving a billion-user messenger where payments need to feel as instant as sending a text. The Catchain 2.0 upgrade that opened the 2026 roadmap pushed block times to roughly 400 milliseconds and finality to about a second, and the fee cuts brought the cost per transaction to around $0.0005, the combination a payment network needs if users are never to think about speed or cost.
There is a tradeoff embedded in the speed upgrade worth knowing: more frequent blocks generate more validator rewards, which is expected to raise the network’s annual token inflation from roughly 0.6% toward 3.6%, meaning more new Gram enters circulation over time to pay for the security of the faster chain.
Gram also lives inside a broader supply structure that shapes its value. Roughly 2.7 billion Gram circulate today against a larger eventual total, and a portion of new supply continues to enter the market on a schedule, which is the kind of detail that matters more for the investment question than for the basic mechanics.
For the purpose of understanding how Gram works, the essential picture is this: it is the native token that pays for, secures, and powers a fast, cheap, Telegram-linked blockchain, and its usefulness rises or falls with how much real activity that network attracts.
The Gram impostors: how to tell them apart
Most search results fail you here, and this is where the guide earns its keep, because several unrelated tokens share the Gram name and the top-ranking pages often describe the wrong one.
The real Gram, the subject of this guide, is the rebranded Toncoin: the native token of The Open Network, a top-25 cryptocurrency worth billions of dollars, carrying the ticker GRAM as of June 15, 2026. If a page describes a multi-billion-dollar token tied to Telegram and The Open Network, that is this one, the asset that made headlines this month.
The most common impostor is the old proof-of-work Gram, a small and entirely separate token from the 2018 era that trades for a fraction of a cent, with a market capitalization in the low single-digit millions and an all-time high around eight cents. It is built on TON but is not the native token, has no connection to the rebrand, and is the source of the confusion when a “what is Gram” search returns a price like $0.0015 and a market cap near zero.
Many older explainer pages, including some exchange listings, still describe this token, because they were written before the rebrand and never updated. It is not the Gram the world is searching for in 2026.
Two further lookalikes muddy the waters. GRM is a separate, low-value token on the TON platform, unrelated to the rebrand. And GRAMPUS, sometimes displayed with the GRAM ticker, is an unrelated Web3 gaming project launched in 2025. Neither has anything to do with the Toncoin rename.
The quickest test to cut through all of it: if the token in front of you is not the multi-billion-dollar native asset of The Open Network, it is not the Gram that the rename made famous. Check that the market capitalization is in the billions and that the project is explicitly described as the renamed Toncoin, and you will never confuse the real Gram with its namesakes.
A critical scam warning
The official announcement was blunt about one thing, and it bears repeating prominently, because rebrands are a favorite hunting ground for thieves.
No action is required from you, and any message telling you otherwise is a scam.
There is no migration, no swap, no claim, and no official website where you must “upgrade” or “exchange” your Toncoin for Gram. The rename happened automatically on-chain; holders did nothing and their tokens became Gram on their own.
Scammers exploit moments like this by blasting out fake “migrate your TON to GRAM now” messages that lead to wallet-draining websites, and the official TON channel explicitly warned that any site asking users to claim or migrate is fraudulent.
If anyone, by email, direct message, social post, or pop-up, asks you to connect your wallet, send tokens, or visit a page to claim Gram, treat it as an attempt to steal your funds and ignore it. The genuine rebrand required nothing from you, and anything demanding action is lying about that fact to rob you.
How to buy Gram (GRAM)
For anyone moving from understanding Gram to acquiring it, the process is the same one used for most major cryptocurrencies, with a few rename-specific notes.
Gram trades on major centralized exchanges under the GRAM ticker, having transitioned automatically from the old TON ticker. Exchanges including KuCoin and MEXC support the token and converted existing balances one-to-one during the rebrand, and the broad set of venues that listed Toncoin now list it as Gram.
The general path to buying is straightforward: open an account on a reputable exchange that lists GRAM, complete the identity verification the exchange requires, deposit funds by bank transfer, card, or stablecoin, and then place an order on the GRAM market, typically a pair like GRAM/USDT. A market order fills immediately at the current price; a limit order lets you set the price you are willing to pay.
Beyond the exchange, holders have choices about custody. Leaving Gram on an exchange is convenient and suits active traders, but it means the exchange controls the keys. Moving Gram to a self-custodial wallet, including the wallet built into Telegram and other wallets that support The Open Network, puts you in direct control of the asset and lets you stake it or use it across the network’s apps.
For larger holdings, a hardware wallet that supports the network adds a layer of security by keeping the keys offline. Whichever route you choose, two cautions apply specifically because of the rebrand: first, verify you are buying the real Gram, the native token of The Open Network with a multi-billion-dollar market cap, and not one of the lookalike tokens described above, by checking the ticker and the project on a reputable data source before trading. Second, ignore any “migration” prompts, since buying Gram is a normal exchange purchase and never requires claiming or swapping through an unofficial site.
None of this is a recommendation to buy. It is a description of how the process works for those who have decided to, and the decision itself deserves its own scrutiny.
Is Gram a good investment?
This is the question underneath all the others, and a clear answer separates what the rename does from what it does not.
Begin with what the rename does not do: it does not, by itself, make Gram more valuable. A name change creates no new demand, alters no token economics, and adds no users. The brief price spikes that greeted each roadmap announcement, including the rename, have tended to fade, because a cosmetic change has no fundamental reason to sustain a higher price.
In fact, the token traded lower in the days around the rename taking effect than it had when the rename was first announced, a textbook case of a market pricing in news ahead of the event and selling once it arrived. Anyone treating the rename itself as a reason to buy is misreading what happened.
The real case rests on something the rename only serves: the conversion thesis. Gram’s bull argument is that Telegram’s roughly one billion users represent the largest built-in distribution channel in crypto, and that the network upgrades, the fee cuts, Telegram’s validator commitment, and now the familiar Gram brand are all designed to turn some meaningful slice of that audience into active users of the token, for payments, apps, and services inside the messenger.
If even a small percentage converts into regular users, the demand for Gram could grow substantially. That is the genuine opportunity, and it is real.
The risks are equally real and deserve equal weight. The conversion has been promised before and has not durably arrived; a 2024 surge in Telegram mini-game users showed how quickly such audiences can appear and then vanish once incentives end. The network’s token supply continues to grow, both through the inflation the speed upgrade introduced and through a scheduled release of additional tokens, which creates persistent selling pressure that demand must outrun.
The asset is well below its 2024 peak and has been volatile in both directions. And the entire thesis depends on execution by Telegram and Durov over years, not months. Gram is best understood as a high-conviction bet on a specific outcome, mass consumer adoption flowing from Telegram into the token, instead of a settled blue-chip holding, and its wide range of possible futures reflects how uncertain that outcome is.
The fuller version of this analysis, with price scenarios across the rest of the decade, is worth reading before any decision, and no part of this guide is investment advice. Position any exposure according to your own risk tolerance and research.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Gram the same as Toncoin?
Yes. Gram is the new name for Toncoin, the native token of The Open Network. The rename took effect on June 15, 2026, after a community vote passed with 81.22% support, changing the token’s name, ticker (from TON to GRAM), and logo. The blockchain is still called The Open Network. Holdings, addresses, and value are unchanged, so 10 Toncoin automatically became 10 Gram, with no swap or action needed.
Do I need to swap or migrate my Toncoin to Gram?
No. There is no swap, migration, bridge, or claim required. The rebrand happened automatically on-chain, and existing tokens became Gram with no action from holders. Any message telling you to migrate, exchange, or claim Gram is a scam designed to steal your funds. Your wallet address, balance, and holdings are identical to before the rename.
What is the Gram ticker symbol?
The ticker is GRAM. It replaced TON on June 15, 2026, so trading pairs that appeared as TON/USDT now appear as GRAM/USDT. During a transition period running into late June, many platforms display the asset as “Gram (prev. Toncoin)” to reduce confusion before settling on the Gram name alone.
Why did Telegram bring back the Gram name?
Gram was the token’s original name in Telegram’s 2018 whitepaper, before the SEC forced the project to shut down in 2020 and Telegram returned $1.2 billion to investors. Independent developers rebuilt the network and renamed the token Toncoin to distance it from the litigation.
With a friendlier regulatory climate and Telegram re-engaging with the network under Pavel Durov’s leadership, the community voted 81.22% in favor of reclaiming the original Gram name as part of the “Make TON Great Again” roadmap.
Is the Gram priced at less than a cent the real one?
No. A token priced at a fraction of a cent with a tiny market cap is the old proof-of-work GRAM from 2018, a separate and unrelated token, not the rebranded Toncoin. The real Gram is the native token of The Open Network, a top-25 cryptocurrency worth billions, trading near $1.65 around the time of the rebrand. Lookalike tokens including GRM and GRAMPUS also share the name and are unrelated.
Does the rebrand change Gram’s price or supply?
No. A rename changes no token economics. Gram has the same supply and the same value it had as Toncoin the moment before the change. Price movements around the rebrand reflected market sentiment and trading activity, not any mechanical effect of the name change.
Separately, the network’s speed upgrade is expected to raise annual inflation from roughly 0.6% toward 3.6%, but that is a consequence of the technical changes, not the rename.
Where can I buy Gram?
Gram trades on major centralized exchanges under the GRAM ticker, including venues like KuCoin and MEXC that converted Toncoin balances one-to-one during the rebrand.
The process is the same as buying most cryptocurrencies: open and verify an account on a reputable exchange that lists GRAM, deposit funds, and place an order on a GRAM pair such as GRAM/USDT.
Always confirm you are buying the real Gram, the multi-billion-dollar native token of The Open Network, rather than a similarly named lookalike token.
Is Gram a good investment?
This guide does not provide investment advice. The rename itself does not make Gram more valuable, and the price actually fell in the days around the change taking effect.
The genuine investment case rests on whether Telegram converts its roughly one billion users into active Gram users, a real opportunity weighed against real risks including token supply growth, a history of adoption surges that faded, and dependence on years of execution.
Anyone considering Gram should read a full price analysis and size any position according to their own risk tolerance.
As of June 16, 2026. Cryptocurrency markets are volatile, and information can change quickly; verify current details with official sources before acting. This article is information, not investment advice.
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