Pavel Durov posted on X on May 4 that Telegram will replace the TON Foundation as the primary operator of The Open Network. Telegram is now the chain’s largest validator. Fees dropped sixfold to roughly $0.0005 per transfer. TON went from $1.35 to $1.73 in 24 hours on $664 million in volume, a 600% spike from the day before.
One post. Three structural changes. And a billion dollars added to the market cap before most people opened the article.
What “replacing the Foundation” actually means
The TON Foundation has been running the network since 2020, when Telegram walked away after a legal fight with the SEC. Independent developers kept the chain alive. The Foundation coordinated upgrades, grants, hackathons, and governance. For six years, Telegram and TON were technically separate.
That is over. Telegram is absorbing day-to-day operations: network maintenance, protocol upgrades, validator infrastructure. The Foundation keeps a community oversight role and veto power on major governance changes, but the engineering and product decisions now run through Telegram directly. Durov framed it as step two of the “Make TON Great Again” roadmap he announced in April.
Telegram staked approximately 2.2 million TON, about $2.88 million, to become the chain’s leading validator. That gives it the largest single voting weight on the network. The validator role is not symbolic. It means Telegram is directly securing the chain and earning block rewards from it.
Fees at $0.0005 and block times under a second
The technical changes came before the governance change. Catchain 2.0 went live on April 9, cutting block generation from 2.5 seconds to roughly 400 milliseconds. On May 1, fees dropped to a fixed base of about 0.00039 TON per transaction. At current prices, that is half a cent.
For context, Solana’s average transaction fee is around $0.003. Ethereum L1 fees fluctuate between $1 and $10 depending on congestion. TON is now cheaper than both by an order of magnitude. Whether that matters depends on whether developers build on it, but the infrastructure argument just got a lot sharper.
Durov said a redesigned ton.org, new developer tools, and additional performance upgrades will ship within two to three weeks. TON Teleport, a trustless Bitcoin bridge, is planned for later in 2026.
950 million users, one chain, one company calling the shots
Here is the part that makes people uncomfortable. Telegram has 950 million monthly active users. TON processed 1.5 billion transactions in Q1 2026. The network’s TVL hit $1.2 billion by April. The Telegram wallet has over 10 million users. Those are real numbers. But all of them now flow through a single company’s decision-making.
Telegram’s validator share is projected at around 25% of the network. That is not a majority, but it is the single largest block. Combined with control over the development roadmap, the fee structure, and the user-facing wallet, it creates a level of centralization that DeFi purists will hate and pragmatists will shrug at.
The counter-argument: a foundation that struggled with scaling and slow upgrade cycles was not serving users well either. Durov personally invested $5 million into TON liquidity pools in late 2024. When asked on X if glory days lie ahead, he replied with one word: “Inevitable.”
June validator vote on inflation is the next test
Catchain 2.0 sped up block production. Faster blocks mean more block rewards, which pushed projected annual inflation from 0.6% to roughly 3.6%. That is a problem. Validators are expected to vote in June on cutting masterchain rewards from 1.7 TON to 0.35 TON per block and mainnet rewards from 1 TON to 0.2 TON. The goal: keep the speed without printing too many tokens.
That vote is the first real governance test under the new structure. Telegram as the largest validator will have outsized influence on the outcome. If the inflation fix passes cleanly, it validates the centralization trade-off. If it gets messy, every criticism about single-entity control becomes louder.
TON’s market cap sits at $4.66 billion. The mini-app ecosystem inside Telegram is growing. The P2E tokens (CATI, HMSTR, NOT) that launched on TON are already burning supply. Telegram’s Q3 2026 Stars revenue-sharing rollout could create structural demand for TON as an ad-payment token. All of that is bullish if you trust one company to run the infrastructure. The market just bet $1 billion that it does.
