Gram price: can the TON blockchain return to the top 10?

The Open Network, better known as TON, is drawing attention again after a period of relative quiet. The blockchain, originally developed by the team behind Telegram, is renaming its coin unit from TON to Gram. The price is currently $1.39 with a market cap of $3.82 billion. Two years ago, the coin peaked at an all-time high of $8.24, after which the price fell by 83%.

Gram is available at OKX and Bybit.

In short:

• Toncoin renames itself to Gram, harking back to the original name from the 2018 whitepaper.
• The network processes more than 100,000 transactions per second and is directly accessible via the Telegram app.
• With 176 million unique users and more than a billion potential Telegram users, mass adoption is still in its infancy.

From SEC lawsuit to restart

The story of TON begins in 2017, when the Telegram team first set out the blockchain. The plans, however, hit legal problems: in 2020, a lawsuit by the US securities regulator SEC forces Telegram to abandon the project. A year later, an open-source group by the name of Newton picks up the thread again and founds the TON Foundation.

The name change from TON to Gram follows a community vote and is a deliberate return to the project’s roots. Gram is the currency unit already described in the original 2018 whitepaper. The coin serves as a means of payment for transaction costs on the network, as a savings vehicle in staking, and as a voting tool in decisions about the protocol.

Technical foundation of the network

Technically, TON distinguishes itself from many other blockchains through a combination of dynamic sharding and an asynchronous architecture. The network automatically splits itself into subchains as load increases, and merges them again when things quieten down. During public tests, the network achieves more than 100,000 transactions per second, which is enough to support the entire Telegram app.

Transactions are processed almost free of charge: a standard transfer costs around 0.00039 Gram, and USDT transactions 0.001 Gram. The block time is around 0.4 seconds, meaning payments are settled almost instantly. Smart contracts run on the TON Virtual Machine, which supports zero-knowledge cryptography.

Telegram as distribution engine

What sets TON apart from most other Layer 1 blockchains is its direct integration with Telegram. Anyone who creates a wallet via the Telegram settings immediately gets access to hundreds of mini-apps and decentralised applications. The offering ranges from mobile games to DeFi products.

At present, the network has 399 validators, more than 1,000 nodes, more than 176 million smart contracts and 1.7 million active wallets per month. Telegram has more than a billion active users worldwide, of whom an estimated 176 million already use a TON wallet. The remaining 800 million users have yet to be reached.

Whether Gram will find its way back into the top 10 of largest cryptocurrencies depends heavily on further adoption via the Telegram platform and the restoration of market confidence. The coin currently sits at position 22 in the CoinMarketCap ranking with a 24-hour trading volume of approximately $35 million.