History of TON: from the Gram ICO failure to the 2026 ecosystem

The history of TON is the history of a blockchain that died twice and came back twice. In 2017 the Durov brothers planned to launch a “third-generation blockchain” inside Telegram. In 2020 the project was formally shut down. Today, in 2026, the TON ecosystem is one of the most active in the world by user count. We unpack how a working network grew out of a legal dead end.

2017–2018. The Durov brothers’ ambitious plan

In December 2017 Telegram published the technical whitepaper of the Telegram Open Network (TON). The document was authored by Nikolai Durov — Telegram’s chief technical architect and Pavel’s older brother. The idea was bold: build a blockchain capable of millions of TPS, bind it to a messenger with 200M+ users, and roll out a payment infrastructure on top of an existing social network.

The whitepaper architecture described three layers: masterchain, workchains, shards with dynamic sharding. This was a serious technical project — not “another Ethereum fork” but an original network model.

To finance development Telegram ran a closed ICO: Gram (the future network’s native token) was sold to accredited investors in two rounds in February and March 2018. They raised $1.7 billion, making it the second-largest ICO in crypto history (after EOS).

Buyers included major venture funds, including U.S. ones. That became the problem.

2019. The SEC stops the launch

In October 2019 Telegram announced: mainnet launch and Gram distribution to investors would happen by the end of the month. Eight days later, on 11 October 2019, the U.S. SEC sued Telegram Group Inc. and TON Issuer Inc.

The SEC’s position: the sale of Gram to U.S. investors was an unregistered securities offering, violating the Securities Act of 1933. The SEC obtained a temporary restraining order halting token distribution two weeks before launch.

2020. The unwind

In March 2020 federal judge Kevin Castel sided with the SEC and issued a preliminary injunction against Gram distribution. Telegram tried to appeal, but in May 2020 announced:

We have made the difficult decision to abandon TON.

On 25 May 2020 Telegram withdrew the appeal. Under the SEC settlement the company had to:

• return roughly $1.224 billion to investors (net of what was already repaid);
• pay an $18.5 million civil penalty.

That closed the “TON by Telegram” chapter. But not the blockchain itself.

2020–2021. Free TON — the independent restart

By the time Telegram bowed out, the TON code was already published — Nikolai Durov and the team had pushed the implementation to GitHub. Without it Telegram could not have proven to investors the network actually worked.

In May 2020 an independent developer community, mostly from CIS countries, brought the network up using that code under the name Free TON. The network ran, validators validated, the token (then called Crystal) moved between addresses.

A separate fork lived in parallel — TON Crystal by another group. By 2021 the situation stabilised: Free TON rebranded to The Open Network (TON), the token was renamed Toncoin, and the TON Foundation was formed as a non-profit.

This was the pivotal moment: for the first time in history a major blockchain project formally shut down by its creators continued to live as an independent community.

2022. Telegram returns — as a user

In September 2022 Telegram announced TON integration: the ability to buy .ton domains and NFT numbers through Fragment — Telegram’s own auction platform. That was a strong signal: the messenger was not coming back as the owner of the network, but it acknowledged TON as “its” blockchain for commercial integrations.

By the end of 2022 Telegram launched the built-in @wallet bot — a custodial service from Wallet (a company separate from Telegram but officially integrated). Any Telegram user could get a TON address in one click.

2023. Tonkeeper, mini-apps, the ecosystem

2023 became the infrastructure year. TON Connect 2.0 — the standard for connecting wallets to dApps — went live and saw mass adoption. Tonkeeper crystallised as the leading non-custodial wallet. The DEXs STON.fi and DeDust appeared, along with staking pools Tonstakers, Hipo, and bemo.

The headline event: Telegram Mini Apps — a framework for web apps inside the messenger. By the end of 2023 thousands of projects started building on TON specifically as mini-apps.

2024. The year of Notcoin and explosive growth

In January 2024 a simple mini-app called Notcoin launched in Telegram — a “tap the screen and accumulate points” game with points later swappable for the NOT token on TON. By the time the token launched in April 2024, Notcoin had 35 million users.

After Notcoin the tap-to-earn flood did not stop: Hamster Kombat (300M+ registrations), Catizen, Yescoin and dozens of others. Not all of them paid investors back (most airdrops underperformed), but the onboarding effect was massive: tens of millions of people opened a TON wallet for the first time.

By the end of 2024 the network had ~34 million activated wallets, DeFi TVL peaked at roughly $1.1 billion in July 2024.

2025. Cooldown and maturity

After the 2024 euphoria 2025 brought a sober mood. Ecosystem TVL dropped from the $1.1B peak to $400–600M by mid-year. The Toncoin price ran the standard cycle — a spike to $7–8 followed by a correction.

But ecosystem quality grew. Headline 2025 events:

• Toncoin Payments — paying inside Telegram bots via TON became a production feature.
• USDT on TON crossed $1B in on-network supply.
• TON Domains integrated with regular DNS — .ton addresses started resolving via gateways.
• Catchain 2.0 — a consensus upgrade that sped the chain up roughly 10x.

By end-2025 the network had 44.6M unique wallets and ~1.7M monthly active.

2026. Telegram becomes a validator

May 2026 brought a symbolic turn: Telegram FZ-LLC became the largest validator of the TON network. This is not a return to ownership (the network is still governed by the TON Foundation and the validator set collectively), but it shows the messenger is committing to TON as long-term partnership infrastructure.

In April 2026 base fees were also cut roughly 6x — TON became even cheaper for users. DeFi TVL as of May 2026 sits around $158M (after a series of corrections), but active users and on-chain transactions keep growing.

What survived from the original idea

Comparing TON 2026 to the 2017 whitepaper:

Most of the architectural ideas made it into production — despite the team change and the legal collapse.

Lessons

The TON story has a few patterns useful for understanding other projects:

1. Jurisdiction beats technology. A blockchain with a brilliant design did not launch because its creators sold the token to U.S. buyers without registration. The SEC has since become the de-facto top regulator of the global crypto market.
2. Open source is community insurance. Had the TON code not been published, the project would have died with Telegram’s decision. But it was — so the community continued.
3. Social attachment can beat technology. TON is far from the most technically advanced blockchain in 2026. But the integration with Telegram and its 950M+ users gives it a distribution edge no one else — not Solana, not Ethereum — has.

Next

If you want to dig into how the network is built — read the full TON guide. Ready to start using TON — see the wallet selection guide.

Sources

• SEC Halts Alleged $1.7 Billion Unregistered Digital Token Offering, press release 11.10.2019
• TON whitepaper, Nikolai Durov, 2017
• Wikipedia: The Open Network
• TON Foundation, ton.foundation
• Telegram blog, mini apps and TON integration