Durov Says Telegram Users Opened 700,000 Wallets in Two Days
Pavel Durov says Telegram users created more than 700,000 self-custodial wallets in 48 hours. The explorer count includes wallets with no onchain activity, TON TVL is about $42 million, and GRAM sits more than 87% below its 2024 high.
Telegram CEO Pavel Durov said more than 700,000 self-custodial wallets were created on the messaging app in the last 48 hours. That is a big headline number, and it says little so far about how many people are actually using them.
"700K+ self-custodial wallets created on Telegram in the last 48 hours alone."
Pavel Durov, Telegram CEO
Durov posted the figure on Nov. 9. Reports differ on whether it went up first on his Telegram channel or on X, but his post on X carries the same number. He added that "adoption spreads virally: a wallet activates the moment someone receives Grams." Gram is TON's native coin, formerly Toncoin, renamed in June after a community vote that passed with roughly 81% in favor.
The Gram explorer's Telegram wallet dashboard backs the order of magnitude. It showed 714,871 creations in its rolling 48-hour window when checked on Nov. 9, though another reading of the same dashboard put the count at 714,844. It also logged 329,952 new wallets on Nov. 9 alone.
Created is not active
Here is the catch for anyone reading this as a demand signal. The explorer's creation count includes wallets with no onchain transactions. According to GRAM documentation, a wallet is created automatically when a user receives a first token transfer, so a wallet can exist simply because someone sent it something. Active wallets are counted separately and need an onchain transaction.
The dashboard showed 203,663 Telegram wallets with a balance, but that figure covers the whole tracked wallet population, not just the latest 48 hours.
The timing matters too. Durov's phrasing describes the last 48 hours, not the wallet's first two days of availability. He announced the non-custodial wallet in July, a phased rollout began Aug. 31, and Telegram expanded the Money wallet in October. The native wallet is still unavailable to US users.
Price and on-chain backdrop
GRAM was quoted around $1.05 on Nov. 9, more than 87% below its 2024 high of $8.25. It briefly hit $2.72 after Durov's May announcement that Telegram would become the network's largest validator, and rose 9% to $1.56 on the October wallet expansion.
The on-chain picture is thin. TON TVL stands at $42.01 million, according to DefiLlama. Researcher Ismail Rustamov's analysis has it down from $92 million in May, with daily DEX volume near $2.7 million. He estimates about 282,000 active wallets over 24 hours and 2.2 million monthly, roughly 0.2% of Telegram's billion-plus monthly users. The new addresses are mostly microtransactions: Premium purchases, in-app ads and small P2P transfers.
What it means
Distribution is not the problem. Telegram can spin up hundreds of thousands of wallets in two days. Converting them into balances, swaps and TVL is the open question, and so far the DeFi numbers have not followed the wallet counts.
Traders should also mind the overhang. Rustamov flagged a scheduled release of 1.08 billion GRAM tokens in February 2027, and critics keep raising centralization concerns over Telegram's validator weight. A viral wallet count is a strong top-of-funnel story. It is not yet a flow story.
