On October 9, Telegram began rolling out the built-in Gram Wallet to everyone, but it's not enabled for all users simultaneously: some accounts still don't have the wallet section in Settings. Another person can create such a wallet for you by sending a single transfer to your Telegram @username. In the first seven hours, 6,412 addresses used the wallet, and Telegram paid network fees for 14,403 of their transactions.
Why You Might Not Have the Wallet
The wallet is enabled by a server-side feature flag, individually for each account. The wallet_available switch appeared in client configs back in September, and on October 9, it started being enabled en masse, but not for everyone at once. As long as the flag is off for an account, the server rejects any wallet requests made on its behalf, and the section does not appear in the interface.
The flag is enabled both automatically — as part of the rollout — and when another person creates your first wallet for you. On October 9, an account without a wallet received one a minute after an incoming transfer of 0.1 Gram, without needing an app update.
How to Get a Wallet If You Don't Have One
Ask anyone who already has a Gram Wallet with Grams in it to send you a transfer via your Telegram @username. The transfer screen automatically checks if the recipient has a wallet, and if not, it creates one. In the Telegram client code, this is a separate call create_user_ton_wallet: the server sets up a wallet for the recipient, and the transfer then goes to their address.
The minimum transfer is 0.1 Gram. Creating a wallet costs the sender nothing beyond the 0.1 Gram itself, but they must have a non-zero balance: you cannot create a wallet for someone else from an empty wallet.
For such requests, a mutual aid thread opened in the @gramnews comments on October 9: those who have a wallet help, and those who don't post a request.
The bot @gramnewsorg_bot does the same job: it finds your address, creates a wallet if you don't have one, and sends 0.1 Gram for your first transfer. You can call it in any chat by typing @gramnewsorg_bot.
How to Create a Wallet for Someone Else
You need your own Gram Wallet with a balance of at least 0.1 Gram and the recipient's Telegram @username. A transfer can be initiated from the chat partner's profile or by using a link like t.me/sendgrams?to=@username&amount=0.1.
In the link, the @ symbol before the username is mandatory. Telegram for iOS parses as a username only strings that start with @; everything else is considered a wallet address, and the transfer screen will not open for such a link. Telegram Desktop understands both formats.
Wallets are created one by one: the server does not accept a batch of recipients in a single request. Also, a single sender has a limit — about twenty new wallets per hour, after which creation pauses for almost an hour, and after a day of such creations, it pauses for almost a day. Transfers to existing wallets and searching for other people's addresses do not affect this limit.
Why an Address Might Be "Inactive"
A wallet created for you by someone else's transfer receives an address immediately, but the smart contract itself only appears on the network with the first outgoing transaction. Until then, TON blockchain explorers show the address as uninit: the funds are there, but the wallet code has not yet been deployed. This is not an error or loss of funds — after the very first transfer from this address, the status changes to active.
Fee-Free Transfers
Telegram sends five transfers per day at its own expense. A transfer signed in the app goes to the network not directly, but through Telegram's gas wallets — relayers. They pay both the network fee (gas) and the Grams for the transfer execution, so exactly the sent amount is debited from the sender's balance. The minimum for such a transfer is also 0.1 Gram.
There are 32 relayers, all topped up from a single Telegram address. By the morning of October 11, they had paid for 45,788 sends and spent 52.43 Gram on this — 0.00115 Gram per transfer. Their balance is 32,035 Gram: at the same cost, this is enough for approximately 28 million more transfers.
First Days in Numbers
In the first seven hours, by 18:00 UTC on October 9, 6,412 addresses had used the wallet, and Telegram paid fees for 14,403 transactions — about 16.6 Gram.
By 09:20 UTC on October 11, the number of wallets that had received or sent at least one transfer reached 66,239, of which 65,583 appeared since October 9. All Telegram wallets hold 38,531 Gram, and 87,101 addresses have been deployed, including empty ones.
Here, a wallet is considered an address that has received or sent a transfer at least once. Those deployed without a single transfer are not included: for August 31 and September 13 alone, there were about 20 thousand such addresses. Hourly counts are available on the Gram Wallet dashboard; tondevs.xyz and a separate dashboard count wallets using the same smart contract, with adjustments for which addresses are considered wallets.
