GRAM Rallies Against the Trend as Durov Cries Undervalued — Can the Ecosystem Fundamentals Keep Up?

The crypto market has been bleak of late, yet GRAM (TON) has bucked the trend and become one of the few tokens posting gains. Telegram CEO Pavel Durov seized the moment to speak out, saying GRAM's market cap is "severely undervalued."

But can the founder's optimistic expectations win market recognition? And does GRAM have the ecosystem strength to justify a high valuation?

Durov Touts a Top-Three Spot for GRAM, but the Price Tells Another Story

Amid rising hawkish macro expectations, a tech-stock selloff, sustained ETF outflows and escalating geopolitical risks, the crypto market has broadly declined recently, with sentiment sinking into fear.

GRAM, however, has charted its own course, rising against the trend instead of following the wider market down. CoinGecko data shows GRAM is one of the most closely watched trending tokens over the past 24 hours and the second-biggest gainer among the top 100 tokens by market cap. Although the gain was only 5.3%, it showed a degree of resilience during a broad market decline.

Durov then publicly voiced his bullishness on GRAM. He argued that GRAM is the only cryptocurrency truly embedded in a large social ecosystem, that its market cap remains severely undervalued, that it deserves a place among the top three crypto assets by market cap, and that he believes this goal can be achieved in the future.

Beyond the public statement, Durov also updated his X bio, adding the identity tag "Founder of TON blockchain (2019)," further signaling to the outside world his determination to bet on the TON ecosystem again.

As the founder of the globally known messaging platform Telegram, Durov's public remarks quickly brought more market attention to GRAM and boosted market sentiment to some extent.

In fact, TON (Telegram Open Network) was initially launched under Telegram's leadership, with GRAM as its native token. But after US regulatory litigation, Telegram was ultimately forced to exit the project; TON was subsequently taken over by independent developers and the TON Foundation, and the native token was renamed Toncoin (TON). For a considerable period afterward, Durov publicly stressed that he had no direct relationship with the project.

That lasted until May this year, when Durov announced he was taking over Ton again and changed the token's name back to GRAM, becoming the main driving force and largest validator of the L1 network. To push TON deep into the Telegram ecosystem as native payment and application infrastructure, Durov also rolled out a seven-step strategic plan called "Make TON Great Again (MTGA)."

Yet judging by price performance, GRAM has not kept strengthening as the strategy advanced, instead re-entering a downtrend after a short-term rebound. CoinGecko data shows that since hitting a high of $2.7 in May, GRAM has fallen about 55.1%; compared with its all-time high, the decline reaches 85.3%.

Wallet Growth Masks Weak Adoption as Telegram Traffic Fails to Cover Ecosystem Gaps

Beyond GRAM's counter-trend move, Durov also released the latest ecosystem-level data, seeking to further prove its growth potential.

According to Durov, self-custodial Gram wallets on Telegram have recently seen large-scale activation, which the market views as a positive signal of rising ecosystem adoption and which further lifted bullish expectations for GRAM.

The Gram wallet is a native self-custodial crypto wallet launched by Telegram in July 2026. Thanks to being embedded directly in Telegram, which has more than 1 billion users, the wallet was once seen as one of the largest self-custodial wallet rollout attempts in the crypto industry. The wallet first opened to select invited users and, starting October 9, gradually opened fully to Telegram users worldwide.

Unlike traditional crypto wallets that require downloading an app, creating an account and setting up a seed phrase, the Gram wallet introduces an automatic activation mechanism. Users do not need to actively register or go through complicated setup; as long as a Telegram account receives GRAM sent by someone else (even just 0.1 tokens), the wallet is automatically activated and appears in the Telegram settings interface. This design turns a transfer itself into the entry point for wallet activation, greatly lowering the barrier to use.

With the expansion of the wallet's availability and its low-threshold activation mechanism, the number of Gram wallets has grown rapidly recently. GRAM Explorer data shows that as of November 12, the number of self-custodial Gram wallets on Telegram had exceeded 3.53 million, with nearly 650,000 added in the past 48 hours alone.

However, rapid growth in wallet activations does not mean genuine adoption is rising in tandem. Looking at on-chain activity, GRAM Explorer data shows that as of November 12, Gram wallets had about 53,000 active addresses and about 66,000 transactions that day. Relative to the total number of wallets, daily active addresses accounted for only about 1.5%, meaning a large number of wallets have yet to become truly active.

At the same time, only about 188,000 wallet addresses actually hold a GRAM balance, holding roughly 1.683 million GRAM in total, worth about $2.053 million at current prices. Actual holding addresses and their position sizes remain fairly limited.

Although Telegram's huge user base does give GRAM a traffic gateway that is hard to replicate, whether that traffic can be further converted into real on-chain activity, long-term holding demand and sustained economic value remains to be proven.

Beyond user conversion, the TON blockchain's own ecosystem development also faces challenges. At present, Telegram carries almost all of the TON ecosystem's main user entry points and app distribution channels. While this deep binding helps bring in users quickly and lowers app customer-acquisition barriers, it also leaves TON heavily dependent on Telegram and without an independently built, diversified ecosystem.

DeFillama data shows that as of November 12, TON's TVL was only about $45.74 million, far from its all-time peak of about $780 million, and liquidity is mainly concentrated in two apps, Tonstakers and Stakee. Overall, the TON ecosystem still lacks sufficiently rich application scenarios and sustained capital inflows, and has yet to form a scaled, sustainable on-chain economy. Meanwhile, a relatively high development barrier has also limited developer entry to some extent, which is unfavorable for the diversified development of ecosystem applications.

In terms of tokenomics, GRAM also faces some inflationary pressure. In April this year, after the TON team implemented an accelerated block-production upgrade, the rate of new block generation increased to 5 to 6 times the previous level, and the pace of block reward issuance accelerated accordingly, pushing the token's annual inflation rate up from about 0.6% to about 4%. As new tokens from validator rewards keep entering the market, the supply pressure on GRAM further increases.

It cannot be denied that Telegram provides TON with a traffic gateway that other public chains can hardly match, and Durov's return has injected new development momentum into the ecosystem. But from traffic acquisition to real adoption, and from ecosystem expansion to value capture, TON still has many hurdles to clear. Durov may have laid out a vision, but ultimately it will take ecosystem development and market performance to prove it.

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