GRAM Price Surges 10% as a Million Telegram Wallets Go Live

• $GRAM price has broken above the falling channel that capped it since late September.
• Telegram’s built-in Gram wallet drew a wave of new sign-ups within two days.
• Wallet growth has yet to show up in TON’s on-chain liquidity.
• The 50-day moving average near $1.27 is the next hurdle for buyers.

$GRAM, the token formerly known as Toncoin, rose close to 10% on November 11 and traded around $1.25 on OKX, breaking out of a downtrend that had dragged it from $1.726 in late September to a low of $0.990 earlier this month. The rally followed a claim from Pavel Durov, Telegram’s founder and CEO, that users of the messaging app had created more than 700,000 self-custodial Gram wallets within 48 hours, a figure on-chain analytics account Lookonchain later put above 1 million, citing Durov. With a 24-hour gain of about 13.5% on aggregate data and a market value of $3.55 billion, $GRAM outpaced a crypto market that spent the day mostly in decline.

Volume Backs the Channel Breakout

Since the September peak, $GRAM had printed lower highs and lower lows inside a falling parallel channel, a pattern in which each bounce stalls below the one before it. Buyers stepped in just under $1.00, and two strong daily candles carried the price through the channel’s upper edge and above $1.164, the 0.236 Fibonacci retracement of the whole decline. The token has now won back roughly a third of what it lost between late September and early November.

Daily volume on the breakout was the highest on the chart since at least August, which points to broad participation behind the move. The RSI reading of 53.81, up from below 30 a few days ago, shows buyers now holding a slight edge over the past two weeks, with plenty of room left before the 70 area that usually marks an overheated market. The daily candle still had about ten hours to run at the time of writing, so the breakout needs a close above the channel to count.

A Double Barrier at $1.27

The rebound now runs into the $1.271 to $1.277 zone, where the 0.382 retracement overlaps with the 50-day exponential moving average, a line that tracks the average price of the past 50 sessions with extra weight on recent days and has stayed above the price since mid-October. A daily close above that zone would leave $1.358 as the next level, while the 0.618 retracement at $1.445 and the 200-day EMA at $1.466 form a heavier ceiling higher up. If sellers defend $1.27, the price could slip back toward the old channel line near $1.164, and a break there would expose $1.077 and then the $0.990 low.

How a Telegram Wallet Gets Counted

Durov credited the automatic activation feature, which creates a wallet once a user receives Gram, for the surge that included 329,952 registrations on November 9 alone, and that detail shapes how the numbers should be read. On TON, a wallet address can be derived from a user’s keys before any record of it exists on the blockchain, and the account only appears in the network’s state after someone sends funds to it. Telegram generates those keys inside the app and leaves them under the user’s control, which makes the wallet self-custodial, so any Gram transfer to a new contact can turn a dormant address into an active one.

That design hands TON a distribution channel few networks can match. Telegram reports more than 1 billion monthly users, and every existing holder can onboard another person simply by sending tokens in a chat. The same mechanism also means a wallet count measures how far tokens have spread, while saying little about how many people come back to use them.

DeFi Liquidity Is Still Shrinking

On-chain money has not followed the sign-ups so far. Funds locked in TON decentralized finance, the lending and trading apps that run on smart contracts without a middleman, stood near $42.9 million in early November, less than half of the roughly $92 million recorded in May, according to DeFiLlama data. New wallet owners have mostly held their tokens or passed them between contacts without putting capital to work in TON applications.

Durov took a more aggressive view on November 10, writing on his official Telegram channel that Gram was “ridiculously undervalued” and belonged among the three largest cryptocurrencies by market value. At $3.55 billion, $GRAM would need a valuation dozens of times higher to get there, so the remark reads as a statement of ambition from the person with the most influence over the project, even though Telegram abandoned its original Gram token in 2020 after a lawsuit from the US Securities and Exchange Commission, returned about $1.2 billion to investors and paid an $18.5 million penalty, before Durov retook control of the ecosystem this year and Telegram became the network’s largest validator.

Active Addresses Matter More Than Sign-Ups

For holders, the rollout shifts the focus to data that reflects repeat use, mainly daily active addresses and stablecoin balances on TON. The network logged roughly 117,600 daily active addresses in July, and a sustained climb from that base would give Durov’s valuation argument something to stand on, whereas flat readings would leave the price dependent on announcements. Exchanges also matter here, because under the EU’s Transfer of Funds Regulation a regulated crypto provider must verify that a user owns a self-hosted wallet before accepting transfers above €1,000 (about $1,150), which adds a step for European Telegram users moving Gram onto trading platforms.

The July announcement promised instant transfers with zero fees, yet Telegram has never said who pays the network costs behind them, and with Durov now pointing to more than a million wallets, the cost of subsidizing that activity will grow with every new user who actually starts sending tokens.