Who runs the streets? #1: Cohorts

New wallets in TON appear in waves: each wave has a reason, and Telegram itself orchestrated almost every reason. On January 14, 2022, Morgenshtern released the music video «ПОЧЕМУ?» (WHY?) mentioning TON — GRAM then cost $3.47, and over the next five months, 227 thousand wallets were created on the network, three times more than in its entire previous history. On October 26, 2022, username auctions opened on Fragment with GRAM at $1.80, and on December 6, anonymous numbers were added there for $1.82. On May 16, 2024, Notcoin was distributed — GRAM cost $6.60, and 554 thousand wallets received the token on the very first day. On January 23, 2025, the first collectible gift was released on the blockchain; GRAM had dropped to $5.08 by that day. Today it costs $1.40. Based on these events, the network's history is divided into sixteen windows — what remains of each is analyzed below.

Total number of wallets

There are 57.5 million wallets in total, with 5.1 million showing activity in the last 90 days.

The count does not equal the number of people: exchanges and services create wallets en masse, so not every address is created by a user themselves. Nevertheless, these millions still illustrate the overall demand within the network.

Who the wave of tap-to-earn applications brought

The 2024 wave of tap-to-earn applications brought the most people: Notcoin, Hamster Kombat, Blum, the claim of DOGS with HMSTR and CATI, followed by Cats, Tomarket, and MemeFi. The DOGS claim here refers to the five weeks from August 26 to September 30, 2024, when DOGS distributed tokens based on Telegram account age, followed by HMSTR and CATI distributions: during these weeks, 14.3 million wallets appeared on the network — more than in any other window of the grid. Together, tap-to-earn applications created 34.2 million wallets, three-fifths of the entire network. 483 thousand of them remain active. Over the past six months, 39 thousand of these wallets paid on Fragment, and together they spent 9.3 million TON there — on stars, premium, advertising, and gifts. Per thousand wallets brought in, the DOGS claim generated 79 TON, while Hamster Kombat generated 309.

The cards below show what happened to their tokens: the price on the day of distribution, one month after, and today. No open source provides historical capitalization, so it is manually calculated in the first two columns — the token supply on that date multiplied by the price of that day; the "Now" column shows the market capitalization. For HMSTR, part of the supply was locked, so its first two figures are overstated.

Who actually pays

Money is harder to count than wallets. The largest Fragment payer over six months is Telegram itself: the wallet labeled telegram/fund sent 47.02 million TON in sixteen transactions. This is followed by star resellers: split.tg with 3.04 million TON and 441 thousand payments, starsov with 2.03 million TON and 1.03 million payments. They are not included in the table: it counts retail — unlabeled wallets, not exchange deposit addresses, not sybils from TON Foundation's labeling, and no more than 500 payments over the wallet's lifetime.

Payments are made not only in TON, but almost exclusively in it. By the same retail measure, 2.45 million USDT from 12.4 thousand wallets went to Fragment over six months, compared to 48.2 million TON from 192 thousand. There is one payer in dollars for every sixteen payers in TON.

The Durov wave

Durov created his first wave in the autumn of 2022, and it still holds both top spots: for the share of active wallets and for money spent on Fragment. Usernames and anonymous numbers — products that Telegram launched itself and Durov announced personally — fueled it. From August 29 to December 31, 2022, 113 thousand wallets joined the network, 0.2% of all ever created. Four years later, 17.9% of them are still active: this is the best result among completed waves, twice as high as the next. For every thousand wallets in this wave, 3,570 TON were spent on Fragment over the past six months — forty-five times more than for the DOGS claim. People came to buy a name and stayed to buy stars, premium, and gifts.

The era of gifts

The era of gifts became the first mass wave that also pays: 8.8 million wallets, 49 thousand retail payers, 16.0 million TON over six months. This accounts for one-third of all retail in this calculation.

The issuance of gifts themselves is also measurable: 1.33 million collectible gifts have been minted in collections labeled on Dune, and 450 thousand of them have been sold at least once on the blockchain. Back in June 2025, Durov noted that collectible gifts had increased in price several times in a month, and TON became the leading blockchain by daily NFT trading volume — second only to Ethereum if only on-chain transactions are counted.

The post on Telegram — @durov

Stickers

NFT stickers did not create a separate wave. They are not made by Telegram, but by teams around the ecosystem: Open Builders, marketplaces, and small studios, each with its own bot and contracts. Since December 2024, 6.1 million TON from 93 thousand wallets have gone to labeled sticker contracts, and 95% of this money came between February and October 2025. After that, the count is in the hundreds of payers per month: 679 in April 2026, when Sticker Pad opened to everyone, and 151 in August. Stickers bring almost no new people: among payers, only 304 wallets were created in 2026. However, those who came stay: over the last 90 days, 31.7% of such wallets are active, compared to 8.9% network-wide. All of this is a lower estimate: primary sales for stars are not visible on the blockchain, and Sticker Pad packs are traded through their own contracts, which are not included in the labeling.

Sixteen waves in full

The three rightmost columns of the table describe the current day, not the time of the wave itself: how many of its wallets paid on Fragment from March to August 2026 and how much TON they spent there. Fragment itself opened on October 26, 2022, so for early waves, this represents money their wallets are spending now.

The peak network activity — 11.6 million transactions per day — occurred during the same DOGS claim window. This same cohort survived its window the worst: only 0.8% of its wallets remained active.

The 2026 row should be read as incomplete: a wallet created this year is active by definition. What happened to the projects of the waves themselves can be seen in the token rating and the mini-app catalog.

How it was calculated

A wallet's genesis date is the day it first appeared on the network. A wallet is considered active if it had at least one transaction in the last 90 days; the snapshot was taken on August 27, 2026. Payments on Fragment are considered incoming transfers with a non-zero TON amount to addresses labeled fragment within the last 180 days; Fragment's self-transfers are excluded, and USDT is counted separately, based on token transfers to the same addresses. Payments for stickers are transfers to addresses labeled sticker_bot, harbor, items, easy, stickerx, and related ones, starting from December 2024. One person can hold multiple wallets, therefore, cohorts are counted by wallets, not by individuals. Payments from NFT contracts, which handle gifts and usernames, are not included in retail figures. Collectible gifts are counted based on minting events in collections from the rdmcd label on Dune; newer collections might not yet be included, so this is a lower estimate.

Sources