- Pavel Durov announced that Telegram will replace the TON Foundation as the force behind Toncoin and become the largest validator.
- TON has gained 33% in the past day as trading volume surged 650%, with traders betting on Durov’s impact on the project.
Telegram is taking over as the main force behind the TON ecosystem from the TON Foundation, founder Pavel Durov has announced.
Durov revealed that the social media company, whose main platform has nearly a billion users globally, will become the largest validator of the Toncoin network. Under Telegram, the network will shift its focus to technology superiority and launch new developer tools and performance upgrades. Durov says the takeover will be in 2-3 weeks.
Fees in TON have dropped 6× — to nearly zero.
Next step — Telegram replaces the TON Foundation as the driving force behind TON and becomes its largest validator.
The focus shifts to tech superiority.
New https://t.co/Me0w683UiK, new dev tools, new performance upgrades.…
— Pavel Durov (@durov) May 4, 2026
The news was well-received by the market. In particular, Durov’s direct involvement in the project was lauded, with some believing that he can bring the same efficiency and rapid growth that Telegram has recorded. The renowned founder has managed to build a 1-billion-user platform with only 50 engineers, while rivals like WhatsApp employ thousands.
The announcement was also well-received in the market, where TON surged 33% in the past 24 hours to trade at $1.85 at press time, pushing its market cap past the $5 billion mark for the first time since November last year.
The surge has reestablished Toncoin among the top 20 largest cryptos by market cap again, edging past World Liberty’s USD1 stablecoin and Memecore. Trading volume has also surged 650% to hit $753 million.
The gains spread to other tokens in the TON ecosystem as well. Notcoin, which gained popularity as a tap-to-earn token, surged 23%.Â
MTONGA, a memecoin on the TON blockchain, recorded a staggering 980% increase on the news. MTONGA takes from Durov’s tagline of Make TON Great Again (MTONGA), which he is using as a roadmap to transform the network. Currently, the ton.org website bears the symbol MTONGA, which played into the memecoin’s meteoric rise earlier today.
Should Telegram’s Takeover of TON Raise Concerns?
Durov has an ambitious plan for TON. He claims his MTONGA roadmap has seven steps, although he has only publicly revealed the first two. The first focuses on speed and started with the Catchain 2.0 upgrade last month, increasing block generation by 600% to 400 milliseconds. It also slashed confirmation times from 10 seconds to 1 second.
The second step focused on fee reduction. As he revealed in his announcement yesterday, fees have dropped to around $0.0005, and this does not change even when the traffic spikes. This makes costs predictable, which is crucial for enterprise applications and AI agents.
Durov says that most transactions will soon go feeless under the next few upgrades.
But while Durov brings a faster, cheaper and more efficient network, it comes at the cost of decentralization. Currently, TON is a POS chain. According to TON Stat, there are 370 validators from 28 countries who have collectively staked 844 million TON.
Telegram has currently staked around 2.2 million coins, but it holds another 28.2 million tokens, data from Tonviewer shows. If it deploys this stash, it will become the single largest vote on the Masterchain, which finalizes the network’s state.
There are some restrictions, like a max-factor cap that dictates that the largest validator cannot have a stake more than three times larger than the smallest validator. However, even this does not limit how many nodes Telegram can operate; it only limits how much extra work it can do as an entity. Furthermore, Telegram can stake the extra coins through other subsidiaries, effectively working around the restriction.
Telegram already has an outsized influence on TON as it holds a massive amount of Toncoin and is the main channel through which nearly all TON commercial activity flows. By controlling the technical side, it will have almost unlimited power over the network.
