The Open Network — the chain behind the token widely known as Toncoin, originally conceived as Telegram's 'Gram' — has one of crypto's stranger origin stories. Telegram built it in-house between 2018 and 2020, raised $1.7 billion from investors, and then had the entire project shut down by the US SEC before a single token reached the public.
What it does
Rather than die, the open-sourced code was picked up by independent developers who relaunched it as The Open Network, an infinitely-sharded proof-of-stake layer-1 designed to handle very high transaction throughput. Telegram itself later re-engaged, integrating wallets and mini-apps directly into the messaging app used by close to a billion people, turning distribution into the chain's biggest differentiator.
The sharding design lets the network split into an unbounded number of 'workchains' and shards that process transactions in parallel, theoretically scaling capacity with demand rather than hitting a hard throughput ceiling the way many single-chain layer-1s do. In practice this has made the network attractive for Telegram-native use cases: bot-based trading, in-chat payments, and gaming mini-apps that piggyback on Telegram's existing user base.
The Telegram integration is real and unusual in crypto — wallet creation happens inside the chat app, and mini-apps built on the network have driven genuine, if often speculative, retail activity, particularly gambling and trading bots.
Risks
Telegram's own legal and political exposure is the network's biggest overhang. Telegram founder Pavel Durov was detained by French authorities in 2024 over content-moderation allegations tied to the platform, a reminder that the chain's fortunes are tied to a messaging app operating in genuinely contested regulatory territory across multiple jurisdictions.
Much of the on-chain activity skews toward low-quality, bot-driven speculation — trading bots and gambling-adjacent mini-apps rather than sustainable applications — which makes usage metrics easy to inflate and hard to read as genuine product-market fit.
Token distribution and unlock schedules have also drawn scrutiny, with a meaningful share of supply controlled by early contributors and the TON Foundation, raising the usual concentration questions that come with any chain that didn't go through a fully public, permissionless launch.