The Daily TON | News

✈️ Happy birthday, Telegram! ⚫️ Telegram turns 13 today. As Pavel Durov noted, for most of its history, Telegram has ranked among the world’s ten most downloaded mobile apps. ⚫️ For us, as for many TON enthusiasts, this day is special for another reason: without Telegram, TON would probably not exist in its current form. Over the past few years, Telegram has gone from an outside observer to the main force shaping the ecosystem, and now it is preparing for its next big step — launching the native self-custodial Gram Wallet. ⚫️ We still don’t know what comes next for MTONGA. But TON itself is already being prepared for the additional load. Two days ago, Anatoliy Makosov said that collators will go live on August 17 — dedicated nodes that will assemble blocks while validators focus on verifying them. ⚫️ According to Makosov, the upgrade should increase network throughput. And the timing is no coincidence: once the self-custodial wallet launches inside Telegram, developers expect a noticeable increase in onchain activity. ⚫️ So on Telegram’s birthday, we hope it stays the best app for messaging — and eventually helps TON reach a similar position in crypto. @thedailyton

🪙 Is Telegram making Gram Wallet harder to block? ⚫️ Telegram Desktop developer John Preston has published tproxy-server, an experimental web proxy for Telegram. Preston says he vibe-coded the project, and the repo itself describes it as a proof of concept, but the idea is laid out pretty clearly in the documentation. ⚫️ Normally, the Telegram client connects directly to Telegram’s servers. With an MTProto Proxy enabled, that traffic is routed through an intermediary proxy instead, helping users bypass network restrictions. tproxy-server adds another layer: it tunnels those proxy connections over ordinary HTTPS requests to a hostname that still behaves like a regular website to everyone else. ⚫️ Meanwhile, references to a new MTProto layer for TON have appeared in the Telegram iOS beta. According to teleLakel, requests to TON Center are routed through Telegram’s servers rather than being sent directly from the app. ⚫️ Why does that matter? Any wallet needs to talk to the network somewhere when checking balances or broadcasting transactions. Usually, that means connecting to a node or an API provider such as TON Center. If Telegram puts its own servers between the client and TON Center, the wallet no longer needs to connect to the public TON Center endpoint directly, making that connection much harder for an ISP to target or block. ⚫️ There is no confirmed link between the two developments. But amid restrictions on Telegram in Russia, one plausible explanation is that tproxy-server could help tunnel Telegram traffic over ordinary HTTPS, while the new TON layer could remove Gram Wallet’s direct dependency on publicly reachable TON infrastructure. For a wallet that is supposed to live directly inside Telegram, some extra resilience against blocking certainly wouldn’t hurt. @thedailyton

❤️ What does Telegram have in store for its birthday? ⚫️ It’s only Wednesday, but we’re already looking ahead to Friday. Telegram turns 13 on August 14 — the first version of the app launched on iOS on that day back in 2013. ⚫️ This year, the date is especially interesting for the TON community. In July, Pavel Durov promised the largest rollout of a non-custodial crypto wallet in history, saying that a native Gram Wallet would be coming to every Telegram app. ⚫️ Whether Gram Wallet actually drops on Telegram’s birthday is still an open question. There’s nothing in the public Android beta yet that looks like the new non-custodial wallet. Telegram could be saving it for the symbolic date, or just as easily push the release toward the end of August. Either way, the clock is ticking on Durov’s promised “this summer” timeline. ⚫️ Version 12.10 is also expected to bring a few other features. According to dataminer teleLakel, Rich Messages are getting button support, while groups and channels will get Welcome Messages — dedicated messages shown to users right after they join. ⚫️ But for us, Friday’s main story is still Gram Wallet. Back in May, ahead of TON’s birthday, we wondered whether Telegram might finally bring some new TON use cases directly into the app. TON didn’t get a birthday present that time, but three months later one may finally be on the way — this time for Telegram’s own birthday. @thedailyton

🍌 How scammers are making up a new biography for Nikolai Durov ⚫️ Over the past few weeks, mentions of a mysterious AI project called VISION, supposedly linked to Nikolai Durov, have been popping up here and there. As part of our #antiscam series, we decided to take a closer look — and what we found is a pretty unusual example of just how far scammers are willing to go to make a fake project look legitimate. ⚫️ The story they picked is actually quite convincing. More than a year ago, Pavel Durov said that his brother was working on his own “thinking AI,” something different from conventional LLMs. No public details have surfaced since, and it looks like scammers decided to fill that information vacuum themselves. ⚫️ The “project” has its own website, while Nikolai Durov has effectively been given an entirely new online identity. There is a personal résumé-style page listing VISION as his latest project, a LinkedIn profile supposedly belonging to Durov with a matching bio, and — to make the whole thing look even more convincing — an 80-page whitepaper allegedly written by him. ⚫️ The document starts falling apart pretty quickly once you look at it closely. There are plenty of inconsistencies, while the most interesting part — how this new “thinking AI” is actually supposed to think — is described surprisingly superficially. Meanwhile, dozens of pages are spent on much more basic technical details, including hashes and various record formats. We also asked ChatGPT to review the technical side of the whitepaper separately, and its assessment was highly skeptical as well. ⚫️ The biography raises similar questions. As Full Metal Jetton reported last year, very little is known about Nikolai’s life today: he lives in Dubai, got married, and became a father. And given how private he has always been, it is pretty hard to imagine him suddenly setting up a personal landing page and actively promoting a new project online. 💡 The biggest red flag comes at the very end: the project’s website lets you connect a TON wallet and sign a transaction. Needless to say, do not do that. As always with #antiscam, the advice is simple: stay vigilant, verify what you see, and don’t trust something just because it looks convincing. @thedailyton

💡 Why is TON disappearing from project names? ⚫️ A curious migration plan appeared in Tonkeeper’s repository today: the wallet is preparing to move its web app from wallet.tonkeeper.com to app.keeperwallet.com. We haven’t seen any official rebranding announcement yet, but the commit was deleted shortly after it appeared, so there’s a good chance Tonkeeper could soon become Keeper Wallet. ⚫️ This wouldn’t be the first time something like this has happened in the ecosystem. In June, MyTonWallet officially shortened its name to My Wallet. By then, TON was no longer the wallet’s only network: TRON support arrived back in 2024, and the app now supports more than ten blockchains. So the move is hardly surprising. ⚫️ Still, given TON’s current state, rebrands like these are easy to read as a worrying sign: the ecosystem is going through a rough patch, while some of its biggest projects seem to be distancing themselves from TON. ⚫️ We see it differently. For a large crypto product, having a specific chain name baked into the brand eventually becomes more of a limitation than an advantage. Uniswap, Jupiter, Raydium, and PancakeSwap don’t tell you which blockchain they originally launched on either. And if a wallet wants to compete with Trust Wallet, Phantom, and MetaMask, it would be strange to remain simply “the TON wallet” forever. ⚫️ So we’d rather see TON disappearing from project names as a sign that these products have outgrown a single chain. Projects that were built entirely around TON a few years ago are now trying to compete with much bigger players across crypto. @thedailyton

🍌 Is Telegram preparing to launch NFT stickers? ⚫️ Hard to believe, but it has already been more than two years since Telegram first teased NFT stickers and emoji. Back in spring 2024, Pavel Durov said at TOKEN2049 that Telegram planned to tokenize stickers and emoji, with their creators receiving 95% of the sales revenue. ⚫️ Durov used the famous “Haha, classic” duck as an example. The sticker had already spread far beyond Telegram and become a popular internet meme. According to him, had someone owned the rights to it from day one, the NFT could have rivaled Anonymous Numbers in terms of price appreciation. ⚫️ Telegram has not publicly returned to the idea in the two years since. Meanwhile, the ecosystem has already seen third-party NFT sticker marketplaces launch, shut down, and trigger a sizeable wave of community backlash. Pretty much everything has happened except the promised rollout. ⚫️ Now there is a reason to revisit the idea. Community researchers spotted a major update to tlottie, the library Telegram uses to render animated stickers and emoji. According to their findings, it received its first major overhaul in years: frame rendering is now two to three times faster, with the biggest gains coming from small 64×64 animations—the exact size used in the sticker picker and emoji keyboard. The updated library is already being integrated into Telegram Web and Telegram Android. ⚫️ Does this prove that NFT stickers are launching soon? Of course not. Telegram may simply be cleaning up some old code. But if MTONGA is meant to integrate Gram more deeply into Telegram, stickers and emoji fit that strategy too well for the timing to feel like pure coincidence—especially when we have already been waiting more than two years for tokenized collections. @thedailyton

📉 How much has TON changed in a year? ⚫️ It has been over two months since Pavel Durov announced MTONGA’s fourth step. The transition was supposed to take around three weeks, yet the fifth step has still not been announced. Meanwhile, the upcoming self-custodial wallet built into Telegram makes no mention of MTONGA and may well be a separate initiative altogether. ⚫️ So the ecosystem is once again waiting for its next big catalyst. And the longer the silence drags on, the harder it is not to look back and ask: what has actually changed in TON over the past year? ⚫️ Looking at the last 365 days, the numbers are pretty grim. Gram is down more than 50%, DEX volumes have roughly halved as well, onchain activity has declined, and a number of projects have either shut down or quietly disappeared. The community even launched @TheOpenCemetery, a channel that tracks dead TON projects. The active user base has shrunk too: most of those still around are OGs who were here before the tap-to-earn wave. ⚫️ Still, the year was not a complete write-off. Gram has attracted more English-speaking traders and builders. Mikey from Groyp, for example, brought people into the ecosystem who probably would not have paid attention to TON otherwise. And Gram shifting from TON Foundation to Durov looks like a positive signal, reviving hopes that the coin could eventually see deeper integration with Telegram. ⚫️ So yes, things in TON are not looking great. But honestly, they could be worse. We are hanging on for Telegram’s birthday and the launch of its self-custodial wallet—probably the ecosystem’s best chance in a while to finally get some momentum back. @thedailyton

⌨️ How to rent storage on TON Storage ⚫️ Last summer, we covered MyTonProvider — a tool that lets server owners rent out spare disk space and earn TON. According to TON Core developers, the decentralized storage network is primarily used to distribute archival copies of the TON blockchain, although it can store virtually any type of file. ⚫️ Say you need to keep a file available without relying on a single hosting provider. With TON Storage, you can pay several providers to store copies of it and make the file accessible through a .ton link that opens directly in Telegram. Resistor’s app now supports exactly this use case. TON DNS can map a .ton domain to a TON Storage Bag ID. ⚫️ First, upload your files to TON Storage and get a Bag ID — an identifier similar to a magnet link. The easiest option is @ResiStorageBot, while more technical users can upload files through the `tonutils-storage` client. Then open @ResistanceToolsBot, tap the profile seven times, and go to Experimental Features → TON Storage Provider. ⚫️ From there, head to TON Storage → Pin → Storage Providers, paste your Bag ID, and choose the servers you want to use. There are currently more than 15 providers across different countries, while storing 200 GB costs around 10 TON on average. You can choose the storage period and set how often automated checks are performed to confirm that each provider still holds the file. ⚫️ This setup is probably overkill for everyday photos. But when a file needs to remain available without depending on a single host, you can distribute copies across several servers in different countries. As long as at least one provider continues storing the data, the file will remain accessible. ⚫️ You can also become a provider yourself by connecting a server and earning TON for its spare disk space. A detailed setup guide is available via the link. ⚫️ Thanks to the work of independent contributors, TON Storage is finally starting to feel like a usable service. We encourage our readers to give it a try and store a file on the decentralized network. @thedailyton

🍌 JUST IN: Telegram told Reuters that the app will soon return to the App Store.

🍌 JUST IN: Apple Support says Telegram has been temporarily removed from the App Store due to violations involving inappropriate content. It remains unclear what specific content triggered the removal. UPD: On contrast, there is another message from Apple Store Support clarifying the app was hidden intentionally by the app developer. @thedailyton

🍌 JUST IN: Telegram has disappeared from the App Store across all regions. The Telegram beta distributed through TestFlight has also become unavailable. UPD: Telegram told Reuters that the app will soon return to the App Store.

🚀 Everyone has their own TON ⚫️ Even with activity around TON running fairly low, the ecosystem is still alive. Look a little closer, and it starts to feel less like one ecosystem and more like several smaller circles, each with a very different view of where TON is headed. ⚫️ Take prominent crypto influencer Crashius Clay. His feed is extremely bullish on GRAM right now. He is pushing the thesis that TON memecoins could repeat Base’s memecoin run, and that thin liquidity and low trading volumes are only temporary. And he is far from the only one on X making that case. ⚫️ Over on the Telegram-side, the mood could hardly be more different. Channels like Vudi’s and Kirill Filimonov’s show a much darker side of TON — one that can leave you feeling as though the coin’s days are numbered. Years of waiting, frustration with the former leadership’s questionable decisions, and the resulting negativity toward the network are all part of the ecosystem too. ⚫️ But TON is bigger than those two extremes. There are still local communities, small trading circles, Web3 enthusiasts, independent builders, and die-hard TON believers. The upcoming launch of a self-custodial wallet built directly into Telegram is also giving people another reason to pay attention and keeping interest in TON from fading completely. ⚫️ That makes TON difficult to define through a single narrative. It means something different to everyone — and perhaps that is exactly what makes it interesting. What does TON mean to you? @thedailyton

👁 How many official TON explorers are there? ⚫️ Let’s take a break from the news about Pavel Durov being added to Russia’s list of terrorists and extremists and get back to good old TON. Last week, members of the ecosystem noticed that actonscan is now under active development — a new block explorer that some channels have already called “the only official explorer built by TON Core.” ⚫️ The explorer is expected to become part of the Acton toolkit, which we covered in a previous post. Its interface clearly takes inspiration from popular explorers like Tonscan, but actonscan is primarily aimed at developers. It already supports transaction simulation, smart contract debugging, and several other developer-focused features. ⚫️ But actonscan is far from the first official explorer in TON’s history. Back in the early days of the ecosystem, there was ton.cx — a block explorer built by TON Core developers that served as one of the ecosystem’s main developer tools for years. There was also ton.sh, which was promoted by the official Toncoin community during TON’s early years. ⚫️ In fact, the oldest official explorer is still online today: explorer.toncoin.org. It’s a low-level block explorer for inspecting blocks and transactions, and it’s mostly useful for developers. ⚫️ So actonscan is far from TON’s first official explorer — or even its first explorer built for developers. Hopefully, once it fully launches, it will make building smart contracts on TON a little easier, and the ecosystem will finally have more new projects than block explorers. @thedailyton

💀 There’s no such thing as bad publicity ⚫️ Pavel Durov was charged in Russia today with facilitating terrorist activity. The news can hardly be called a surprise: back in April, Pavel himself said that a summons addressed to “suspect P. V. Durov” had been delivered to his former address in Russia. ⚫️ The case is unlikely to cause Durov any immediate trouble. He lives in the UAE and holds Emirati citizenship, while the country’s constitution prohibits the extradition of its own citizens. For now, this looks like another chapter in his long-running conflict with the Russian authorities. ⚫️ TON’s memecoin market, meanwhile, reacted almost instantly. Within hours, several tokens appeared, all trying to capitalize on the criminal case against Pavel Durov. As a reminder, x1000.finance is the most convenient place to track new launches and trade memecoins on TON. ⚫️ Whether any of these tokens will gain real traction and stick around remains to be seen. Memecoins can pump within minutes and disappear just as quickly, so remember to DYOR before buying. We previously explained how to spot promising memecoins before it is too late in a separate post. @thedailyton

📒 Who will actually see Gram Wallet? ⚫️ Things are quiet in TON again, so let’s go back to last week’s main story one more time. This time, here is a subjective #opinion on the future Gram Wallet release — we would be happy to read yours in the comments. ⚫️ On paper, the scale is impressive: one billion users could get a crypto wallet. But shipping the product is not the same as getting people to notice it, let alone use it. The problem is that Telegram still does not really have a proper discovery layer for features and apps. Even regular updates are often discovered through Stories from the official account — if you do not open them, a new feature can easily pass you by. ⚫️ Or take Wallet. It has been available from the menu for almost all Telegram users for several years now, but do we have anyone among our readers who actually found TON through that button? We doubt it. If we are wrong and that was your case, tell us in the comments. ⚫️ A few months ago, even Pavel Durov could not find a better way to promote his own channel than placing a banner above every user’s chat list. But Gram Wallet is unlikely to get the same kind of campaign. Most likely, after launch, it will simply end up somewhere in the menu next to all the other features. ⚫️ In the end, Gram Wallet will almost certainly get media coverage and stay in trends on X for a few days. But for the broader audience, the story may end there. Adding a wallet to Telegram is not enough — users still need a reason to open it regularly. Let’s see whether the messenger can solve that problem. @thedailyton

💡 Subdomain minting is now open ⚫️ A little over a week ago, we wrote about TON DNS subdomains and pointed out that many users had missed this feature. So it is especially nice to see several new tools appear around subdomains in just a few days. ⚫️ Resistor has introduced a beta version of a service that lets you create an on-chain subdomain collection for any .ton domain or Telegram username. Unlike the interface we covered last time, this one lets you set a mint price, run a free claim, reserve specific names, or open a public mint. Each subdomain is minted as a separate NFT that can be freely transferred or sold. ⚫️ The collection has two modes: Linked, where the main domain stays with the owner and, if it is sold, the new owner automatically gets control of the collection; and Locked, where the domain is permanently transferred to the smart contract itself. In the second case, the NFT collection is no longer tied to a specific wallet. ⚫️ For owners of premium TON DNS names such as page.ton, blog.ton, site.ton, and others, this unlocks a new monetization path. They can set their own mint price and earn from selling subdomains. By the way, we took a different route and minted blog.thedaily.ton pointing to our main address — it already shows up in the wallet as an NFT. ⚫️ Another piece of good news: the issue with opening TON Sites inside Telegram, which we mentioned in the previous post, seems to have been fixed. At least, that is what the bug report page suggests. .ton sites now open inside the app again, giving subdomains another practical use case. ⚫️ You can try the new tool through @ResistanceToolsBot. After logging in, tap your profile icon several times — an Experimental Features section will appear in the menu. Open it and turn on the Subdomains toggle. After that, you can create your own collection and mint subdomains under your TON DNS name. @thedailyton

✔️ Your wallet starts with your Telegram account ⚫️ When Pavel Durov announced the built-in non-custodial Gram Wallet, we assumed there probably would not be anything fundamentally new to expect. But it looks like one key piece of that future wallet may have been sitting in public for months. Back in winter, Lagus, one of the TON Core developers, published an experimental Telegram Wallet — and after Durov’s recent announcement, he directly hinted that the future mass rollout may be tied to this exact idea. ⚫️ The main idea behind Telegram Wallet is to remove the seed phrase entirely. Users do not need to write down 24 words or store them anywhere: the wallet is created for a specific Telegram account, and every action is confirmed with a cryptographic signature through the Telegram app itself. At the same time, the funds in the wallet still belong to you, rather than being held by a centralized service. ⚫️ In recent years, many crypto wallets have been moving toward the social login model: instead of saving a seed phrase, users create and recover a wallet through a Google or Apple account. Telegram Wallet follows the same idea, but uses Telegram itself as the login layer. This makes the wallet dependent on access to the messenger, but significantly lowers the barrier to entry. ⚫️ As the developer explains, this setup is possible specifically because of TON’s architecture, where every wallet is essentially its own smart contract. That makes it possible to change the authorization logic itself — for example, replacing a private-key signature with confirmation through Telegram — while keeping the rest of the wallet’s functionality intact. In Lagus’s version, this includes the V5 features we wrote about earlier. ⚫️ There is still no confirmation that this architecture will actually become the foundation of the future Gram Wallet. But the idea itself looks realistic and could make onboarding much easier by simplifying crypto access for millions of Telegram users. Hopefully, we will find out how it really works before the end of the summer. @thedailyton

🍌 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

⌨️ Life after zero fees ⚫️ Two weeks ago, Tonnel’s developer refused to introduce a 2% fee on Telegram Gifts trading, even though all other marketplaces had collectively agreed to do so. Back then, the situation turned into a public back-and-forth between Freeman and Telegram’s in-house designer Adler Toberg. Now that the emotions have cooled down, let’s look at the numbers and see how it played out. ⚫️ According to Dune data, the zero-fee bet worked. Before July 13, Tonnel accounted for around 3.5% of total Gifts trading volume. On the day the fee was reduced, its share jumped to almost 25% and later stabilized around 12–15%. ⚫️ Over the past week, overall market volume dropped by roughly one-third, but Tonnel still managed to grow its own numbers. In other words, zero fees helped the marketplace pull in a meaningful share of the market. ⚫️ Interestingly, Freeman did not stop at lower fees and keeps improving the marketplace. For example, Tonnel added Dump Sell mode today — users can now sell up to ten gifts at once into the best buyer bids. Let’s see where this marketplace fight goes next. @thedailyton

👁 Who is running TON and Telegram’s social accounts? ⚫️ It has been more than a month since the last post in the @gram channel. As a reminder, the latest post there came out on June 15 and was signed by Pavel Durov. Since then, Telegram’s official channels have not published any new messages. So far, this is the longest pause between MTONGA steps. ⚫️ That does not mean communication around the blockchain has disappeared completely — it has just moved mostly to X. The TON account used to post regularly about ecosystem projects and internal updates, but that format has mostly faded. These days, the account is more focused on TON x Telegram content, replies to other accounts, and regular crypto shitposting. ⚫️ Interestingly, around the same time, Telegram’s X account also seemed to shift its content strategy. It has become much more active, replying to other accounts more often, jumping into global news cycles, and posting provocative takes that often rack up hundreds of thousands of views. ⚫️ Because of this, some people in the community have started to suspect that both accounts may now be run by the same person. Alerts from the @TwitterMonitoring channel, which tracks posts from Telegram and TON, make it easy to see that the two accounts are often active on X during the same hours: one starts posting shortly after the other, or vice versa. ⚫️ If this theory is close to the truth, the reshuffle would make sense. After the effective reboot of TON Foundation, much of the old team was sidelined, and the people who used to handle social media may have changed as well. ⚫️ What exactly does this shift in communication strategy mean? Honestly, we do not really know either. So we would be curious to read your theories in the comments. @thedailyton