The story begins with Telegram, founded in 2013 by brothers Pavel and Nikolai Durov (previously creators of VKontakte, the “Russian Facebook”). In January 2018, Telegram published the Telegram Open Network (TON) whitepaper, with its own token called Gram (GRM) — in Q1 2018, two private presale rounds run through British Virgin Islands-registered entities raised roughly $1.7 billion from 171 investors, at the time one of the largest ICOs in crypto history.
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October 2019: the US SEC sues Telegram Group Inc. and TON Issuer Inc., alleging the Gram sale was an unregistered securities offering.
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March 2020: a federal court in New York sides with the SEC, blocking worldwide distribution of Grams.
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May 12, 2020: Durov announces Telegram is fully abandoning TON and Gram (“Today is a sad day...”).
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June 2020: settlement with the SEC — an $18.5 million penalty, $1.22 billion returned to investors, Telegram neither admitting nor denying the allegations.
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The source code had already been open-sourced — an independent developer community (“Free TON”) relaunched the network as “The Open Network” (keeping the TON abbreviation), deliberately renaming the token “Toncoin” to distance it from the litigated “Gram” name. The Switzerland-based TON Foundation took over stewardship.
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Over the following years, the network became deeply embedded in Telegram's roughly 1-billion-user ecosystem (built-in wallet, mini-apps, payments) — even though Telegram itself was officially uninvolved.
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May 4, 2026: a surprise reversal — Durov announces Telegram will replace the TON Foundation as the network's primary driver and become its largest validator. The price jumps 30–37% within 48 hours.
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June 1, 2026: Durov announces, as part of the “Make TON Great Again” (MTONGA) campaign, that the original 2018 name “Gram” will be restored.
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June 8, 2026: the TON Vote community referendum concludes, with 81.22% support.
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June 15, 2026: the rename officially takes effect — Toncoin → Gram, ticker TON → GRAM. IMPORTANT: this is purely a branding change (name, ticker, logo) — the blockchain itself continues to run as “The Open Network (TON)”; there is no token swap, migration, or action required from holders — balances automatically display under the new name at a 1:1 ratio.
Note: two similarly named tokens exist that are NOT the real Gram (GRM and GRAMPUS) — these are entirely separate projects and should not be confused with TON*'*s native asset.