TON is a blockchain: a shared record of who owns what, kept by many computers at once instead of one company's server. Anyone can send money on it, and developers can build apps and their own tokens on top of it. It was designed to be fast and cheap. Its official site says a normal transfer costs about 0.00039 of a coin, and that fees stay fixed no matter how busy the network gets.

The network's coin was called Toncoin until 15 June 2026, when it became Gram, with the ticker GRAM, after 81.22% of the votes cast by holders were in favour. Only the name, the ticker and the logo changed. The coins themselves and the chain stayed exactly as they were, so older articles, exchanges and charts that say Toncoin or TON are talking about the same asset as this page.

TON is closely tied to Telegram, the messaging app, and that tie runs through everything below. On 4 May 2026, Telegram's chief executive Pavel Durov announced that Telegram will replace the TON Foundation as the driving force behind TON and become its largest validator, one of the computers that checks transactions and gets paid for it. Telegram's own products, its wallet, mini apps, usernames and marketplace, are separate businesses. Their users and their revenue are not TON's, and nothing on this page counts them.

On 2 June 2026, the market valued all the GRAM in circulation at $5,590,989,437, the 23rd largest crypto asset at the time. One coin traded at $2.09, against an all-time high of $8.25 on 15 June 2024. For you as a holder, that means a coin worth about a quarter of what it was at its peak.

GRAM is what you pay with to use TON. Every transfer, every action inside an app and every new token created on the network costs a small fee in GRAM, the way a toll road only takes its own tokens at the booth.

GRAM is also what keeps the network honest. Validators must lock up GRAM as a deposit before they are allowed to work: at least 300,000 coins, about 1,000,000 in practice, and no more than 10,000,000 per validator. A validator that cheats can lose part of that deposit, so the more GRAM is locked, the more it costs to attack the network.

And GRAM is how the rules change. Changing TON's settings, such as how much of each fee is destroyed, how many new coins are created or how much a validator must lock, needs the votes of validators holding more than three quarters of the locked GRAM, confirmed over several rounds in a row. Holders vote directly on some questions too: the rename to Gram was decided by a vote weighted by how many coins each voter held.

For you as a holder, GRAM's value rests on those three jobs. If more people pay fees, more validators compete to lock coins and more decisions carry real weight, demand for the coin grows. If they do not, the jobs exist on paper only.

In the year to 4 October 2026, people paid $2,081,525 in fees to use TON. That is what the network itself earned, counted transaction by transaction. Much larger figures are sometimes quoted for "TON fees", but those include Fragment, Telegram's own marketplace for usernames and numbers, which is a Telegram business and not TON's.

Half of every fee is burned, which means those coins are destroyed and no longer exist. The burn started on 17 June 2023, after 76.3% of the 261 validators who voted approved it. Fewer coins existing works like a company buying back its own shares: if demand holds, each remaining coin is a slightly larger slice.

Under the network's rules, the other half goes to the validators who process the transactions. Holders get nothing directly beyond the burn.

The burn is a setting, not a promise carved in stone. TON wrote in 2023 that it "will continue indefinitely", but validators holding more than three quarters of the locked GRAM can change the share that is burned. And the number of coins actually burned so far is not published as a measured figure. What is known is the rule, not the running total.

Set the market value against those fees and the gap is very wide. Over the 90 days to 4 October 2026, fees ran at a pace of $964,999 a year. Against the market value of $5,590,989,437 on 2 June 2026, four months earlier, the market was pricing GRAM at about 5,794 times what the network earned in a year.

Measured against the full trailing year instead, the multiple is about 2,686 times, and the gap between the two numbers is its own finding: fees kept falling through the year. The busiest day on record was 27 September 2024, with $394,205 in fees. On 4 October 2026 the network took in $2,310, which is 99.4% less.

A shop valued at that many times its yearly takings would be priced almost entirely on what people hope it becomes. That can turn out right, and young networks are often priced on hope. For you as a holder, it means today's price is not resting on today's use, and if the use never comes, there is little underneath it.

One claim cuts the other way. Durov wrote on 4 May 2026 that "Fees in TON have dropped 6×", a claim that each transaction got cheaper, and a network that charges less per transfer can earn less while being used just as much. The dollar figures here count total fees, not the number of transfers, so they can neither confirm nor rule that out.

The question that matters most for TON is who holds the steering wheel. The TON Foundation, based in Switzerland, has coordinated the network since 2021. On 4 May 2026, Durov announced: "Telegram replaces the TON Foundation as the driving force behind TON and becomes its largest validator."

That is a plan, and the size of Telegram's role is not measured anywhere. One news report put the planned share at about 25% of validation and said the Foundation keeps a veto, but neither figure comes from Telegram or the Foundation. Durov argued that a large validator like Telegram strengthens the network by drawing other big players in as a counterweight.

On 6 October 2026, 381 validators were running, 100 of them on the main chain that coordinates the rest. That sounds like a wide spread, but one operator can run many validators, so the count does not tell you how many separate hands hold the deposits. Changing the rules needs more than three quarters of the locked GRAM, so whoever holds just over a quarter can stop any change on their own.

Concentration is not new on TON. In 2023, research by an outside firm, shared by TON's own channel, found that at least 85.8% of the supply had been mined by a few connected groups linked to the TON Foundation. Later that year the Foundation named Animoca Brands as the largest validator. For you as a holder, the network's rules are only as neutral as the people with the most votes, and that group is now announced to be led by one company.

GRAM has no maximum supply. New coins are created with every block the network adds: 1.7 GRAM for each block on the main chain and 1.0 for each block on the others, paid to validators as a reward. The original design described a supply that started at 5 billion and would grow "very slowly", by an expected 2% a year. That was a design goal in 2021, not a measured rate today.

On 2 June 2026, 5,190,003,150 GRAM existed in total, already more than the 5 billion the network started with. Of those, 2,670,932,986 were circulating, meaning free to trade. The rest is locked or frozen, and two large blocks of it have dates attached, covered in the next section.

For you as a holder, supply runs against the burn. Only half of a fee stream of about $965,000 a year is destroyed, while new coins are minted with every block. The total has already passed where it started, so more GRAM has been created than burned, and owning the same number of coins means owning a slowly shrinking share of the whole.

Think of a building where the landlord keeps adding floors: each flat holds its value only if new tenants keep arriving. With GRAM, the new floors keep coming whether or not anyone moves in.

The first large block is the TON Believers Fund. In 2023, holders locked 1,033,647,045 of their own coins in a contract for five years, and 283,731,850 more were added as a reward, for a total of 1,317,378,895. They unlock in 36 equal pieces of 36,593,858.2, one every 30 days, from 11 November 2025 to 26 September 2028.

By 6 October 2026, eleven pieces had unlocked, 402,532,440 GRAM, but only 68,171,741 had actually been taken out. Unlocked is not the same as sold. These are holders' own coins, not team or foundation allocations, and most of them have chosen to leave theirs where they are so far.

The second block is 1,081,389,417 GRAM in 171 early mining wallets that never moved. In 2023, validators voted to freeze them until 09:00 UTC on 21 February 2027, and TON's channel described them at the time as more than 20% of the total supply. From that date they can be activated, which is not the same as being sold.

For you as a holder, the dates matter more than the totals. Every month until September 2028 another piece of the Fund becomes free to sell, and in February 2027 more than a billion frozen coins can wake up. Either could add a large amount of GRAM to a market where 2,670,932,986 coins circulated in June 2026.

The value parked in apps on TON, money people have put into its lending, trading and other apps, rose from about half a million dollars at the end of 2022 to $778,170,342 on 21 July 2024, during a wave of games and mini apps. By 4 October 2026 it was $54,285,940, which is 93% below that peak.

That figure leaves a lot out. It does not count liquid staking, services that lock GRAM with validators on your behalf and hand you a receipt you can trade, which held about $258.2 million in early October 2026, more than four times the figure above. It also leaves out coins held on exchanges and the coins in the Believers Fund contract.

So the fall is real, but it is a fall in money parked in TON's apps, not in everything held on the network. The use that matters most to you as a holder is people paying to use the network, and on that measure the fee record tells the same story: busy in 2024, much quieter in 2026.

TON is still being built on. Coinbase listed the coin in November 2025, and in December 2025 tokenized versions of US company shares, called xStocks, launched on TON. These are things built on or around TON, and whatever they earn belongs to them, not to GRAM.

TON did not grow from outsiders building something nobody had asked for. According to press reports, it started inside Telegram, one of the largest messaging companies in the world. Its design document is credited to Nikolai Durov, its code dates from September 2019, and the same reports say Telegram abandoned the original project in 2020 after an enforcement action by the US Securities and Exchange Commission that forced it to return $1.2 billion to investors and pay an $18.5 million fine.

From 2021 the TON Foundation coordinated the network, and it grew alongside Telegram, which built a wallet and mini apps that use TON. In May 2026 Telegram announced it is stepping back in as the driving force, and a month later the coin took a new name.

For you as a holder, this origin cuts both ways. Being tied to a widely used messaging app gives TON a way to reach users that few networks have. But the networks that last tend to be the ones no single company can switch off, and TON's direction is now announced to sit with exactly that kind of company.

Many of the claims you will meet about TON are statements rather than measurements, and it helps to know which is which. TON's site says all fees "are fixed and do not depend on network load" and that a transfer costs about 0.00039 Gram, both its own figures, published without a method. Durov's "Fees in TON have dropped 6×" is a claim about the price of each transaction that the dollar figures cannot test.

Some claims can be checked, and the one that can comes out a little smaller than stated. Durov wrote on 12 May 2026 of "400 validators across 6 continents", and on 6 October 2026 the network's own settings listed 381. He also wrote that validators "compete for 20%+ APR", a yearly return on locked coins that is not independently measured.

Other statements are intentions. The 2023 promise that the burn "will continue indefinitely" lasts only as long as validators keep it, and the 2021 design's 2% yearly growth was an expectation. None of these is a warning sign on its own, but they are a reason to read TON's own numbers as claims until someone measures them.