On June 1, 2026, Pavel Durov announced that the native token Toncoin, which has been circulating on The Open Network for many years, would revert to its old name—Gram, from the era of the white paper, within approximately three weeks, while the network itself would continue to bear the name The Open Network; the officials deliberately emphasized that this is a brand adjustment of "returning to the original intention," and not a chain-level hard fork or technical reconstruction, with no declaration of a break in on-chain assets or protocol logic. For the project party, this name change reconnects the ecological narrative from “community-taken Toncoin” back to the Gram pre-set in the Telegram Open Network white paper, closing the branding loop, but it also rebinds the token name to the same subject mentioned in the SEC lawsuit document from 2020. The "Gram" in the regulatory database and historical judgment is no longer just an archived case entry. For trading platforms, custodians, and issuing parties, all compliance disclosures, user agreements, and risk statements that included “Toncoin” must clearly explain the continuity of “Toncoin is Gram” during the upcoming name change window to avoid mismatches in holder identification, product suitability, and historical regulatory records; as of early June 2026, public information still does not show that the SEC and other agencies have initiated new enforcement procedures regarding this name change, and whether regulation will be reactivated due to the "Gram" old name becoming highlighted remains an uncertain variable hanging over the ecosystem.

The regulatory shadow from SEC lawsuits to community takeover

If we turn back time to 2018, the story began with a typical narrative of "platform self-developed chain": Telegram announced its plans and white paper under the name of Telegram Open Network, with a designed native token called Gram, facilitating financing and technical development. The name became firmly attached to the regulatory record through the SEC lawsuit in 2019-2020, where the SEC officially sued Telegram in 2020, accusing it of issuing Gram as an unregistered security, clearly mentioning Gram in the lawsuit, making it a subject noted in enforcement documents. This means that from that moment, "Gram" ceased to be just a product code but became indexed in the U.S. securities regulatory system, recorded alongside the phrase "unregistered securities issuance."

Under the pressure of this lawsuit, Telegram halted the related issuance and announced its withdrawal from the chain project, forcing the originally platform-led network to transform and hand over control to the community and TON Foundation. The first step after the community takeover was to cut the direct association with the old case at the naming level: the network was renamed The Open Network, and the token was renamed Toncoin. The compliance motivation behind this choice is easy to understand—within the SEC documents, Gram had already been labeled historically, and the new team needed to prove to exchanges, custodians, and regulators that the network currently operating and the issuance that was sued by the SEC were two phases with different governance entities and names. Also, since Gram had been included in a regulatory case, becoming part of the record search, when proposing to rename Toncoin back to Gram in 2026, the name inherently carried the shadow of the old case, and any branding retrospective around it had to assume the premise that regulation could refocus on this identifier based on existing files at any time.

A three-week renaming window: Compliance pressure on exchanges and wallets

The official timeline for renaming Toncoin to Gram was set at approximately three weeks, and it was clearly stated as a gradual transition rather than an instantaneous replacement. For centralized exchanges, custodians, and wallets, this meant a compliance and technical upgrade project compressed into 21 days. On the surface, they needed to synchronously update token names and trading pair symbols in front-end displays, gradually shifting from “TON/USDT”“Toncoin” to “Gram,” but the real difficulty lay in the backend: all code mappings, risk control rules, whitelists and blacklists, KYC/AML processes related to the asset must be migrated without affecting the continuity of user balances and transaction records. Within three weeks, platforms needed to ensure there would be no situation where “Toncoin” and “Gram” were treated as two independent assets by the system, and avoid any discrepancies in names across on-chain deposits and withdrawals, internal ledgers, and customer reports.

Renaming is not just a UI copy replacement; it directly impacts legal texts and reports. Platforms and custodians must revise user agreements and risk disclosures, updating clauses originally stating “Toncoin” to “Gram,” while maintaining notes that explain the continuity of the same asset, to prove in future disputes or regulatory inspections that this is merely a name change of the same native token, not a new asset issuance. Financial institutions and tax reporting systems typically rely on token names, trading pair symbols, and on-chain identifiers for alignment. Within the three-week window, if the name and symbol have changed, but the backend recognition rules are not yet updated, this could lead to the same asset being split into two lines in annual reports or omitted from reporting altogether. In many jurisdictions, the monitoring systems established by regulators and self-regulatory organizations track asset flows using “name + identifier,” while traveling rule service providers and on-chain analytics firms bind asset names to on-chain addresses and network identifiers to form a tagging library. When the name Gram, which was written into the SEC lawsuit document, goes back online, this entire set of tag-dependent infrastructure must reach a unified decision within three weeks: whether to regard it as a continuation of Toncoin or to establish a direct association with the Gram in the old case; otherwise, any deviation in labeling could lead to amplified compliance risks during subsequent trading reviews and cross-platform reporting.

Telegram's return to the brand forefront: Redrawing boundaries of responsibility

When Pavel Durov personally announced on June 1, 2026, that “Toncoin will return to the name Gram within three weeks,” the statement released was not merely a name adjustment but a signal that is hard for regulators to ignore: Telegram and Gram, which have been written into the history of the SEC lawsuit, reappeared in the same context. The public announcement deliberately limited the action to the “branding and naming level,” keeping the network name as The Open Network, without declaring the chain governance entity returning to Telegram; however, from the perception of public opinion, this is more like a public endorsement of the TON ecosystem by the Telegram brand, symbolizing a return after "officially withdrawing" in 2020.

The issue is that the return of the brand does not automatically align with legal responsibilities. Under the current structure, Telegram is a business entity operating the messaging application; the TON Foundation takes on the coordination role in community narratives for network development; while on-chain developers and node operators are portrayed as a distributed community. This split helped tell the story of “Telegram has exited” after the SEC lawsuit. Now, with Pavel personally announcing the return of Gram, it will be difficult for regulators reviewing the case not to ask again: who shapes the roadmap of this public chain in reality? Who decides the naming and external communication of core assets? Even if the announcement repeatedly emphasizes that this is just a branding move, for regulators familiar with the 2019-2020 case, this seems to add new evidence fragments to the old question of “who controls the project,” and in future judgments of responsibility, the boundaries between Telegram, TON Foundation, and the community may be forced to be more clearly delineated or perceived as having been blurred by practical actions.

Regulatory perspective on the risks of returning to the old case named Gram

From the perspective of regulatory files, “Gram” is not a neutral new brand, but a case subject already written into the SEC indictment of 2020. In that lawsuit, the SEC repeatedly referred to “Gram” as the token deemed to be an unregistered securities issuance, whereas the name “Toncoin” used after the community takeover served to cut off historical association in practice: in regulatory search systems, law firm memoranda, and compliance databases, “Gram” usually corresponds to the financing and subsequent enforcement procedures from 2018-2020, while “Toncoin” is recorded as the new network asset during the community-led phase. Now that the name has reverted to Gram, it is equivalent to placing the current native coin back under a label already marked by the SEC; even if the officials emphasize that this is merely a branding and naming adjustment, at the document level, there is inevitably a name overlap with the subject of the old case.

For compliance teams, the real challenge lies in how to handle the equivalence relationship of “Toncoin = Gram” in internal logic. Sanction screening systems and KYC/AML tools typically maintain a mapping table of token names and on-chain addresses. Previously, “Toncoin” could be independently monitored as an entry; now it requires maintaining both old and new names together: externally it is Gram, while internally it still needs to retain Toncoin as an alias to technically distinguish it from the issuance records during the SEC lawsuit. Any customer disclosures, trading notes, and historical flows related to “Gram” may be automatically tagged with risks associated with “old case name” due to this naming overlap, forcing manual compliance reviews to re-interpret “which Gram does this transaction actually belong to.” On this point, publicly available information from regulators remains very restrained: as of early June 2026, there have been no new SEC enforcement actions or sanction announcements specifically targeting this name change; whether the old case will be reactivated due to the name return remains highly uncertain and is thus regarded as a long-term variable that must be included in internal contingency plans by various institutions.

The next step from Toncoin to Gram

From the Gram in the 2018 white paper to Toncoin in the community phase post-SEC lawsuit, and now to the announced return of Gram in 2026, this entire naming cycle effectively stitches the same asset path back into a regulatory file that has been archived for years, merging the narrative of the brand "returning to its original intention" with the historical memory of regulatory agencies once again. In the short term, the most realistic task is not about emotions but texts: the project party and platform need to clearly define the one-to-one relationship between Toncoin and Gram in user agreements, asset descriptions, and risk disclosures, to avoid appearing in a gray area of “same entity different names” or “different entities same name” in asset identification, transaction records, and custodial reports; contracts related to token payments, allocations, or staking must also update names concurrently; otherwise, once a dispute or lawsuit arises in the future, even “which Gram does the contract stipulate” could become a procedural point of contention. Looking ahead a few months, various jurisdictions might use this name change as a sample to re-examine how the same asset should be classified and disclosed under different names and periods, whether it needs to separately list “historical names previously involved in SEC lawsuits” in prospectuses, licensing applications, or risk warnings, and how to handle continuity with the 2019-2020 issuance phase. However, as of early June 2026, public information still only remains at the name change announcement itself; no new enforcement actions or detailed guidelines have yet emerged. Whether this naming loop will be written as a compliance chapter or an old case sequel can only be left to regulatory and judicial practices in the coming seasons to provide answers.

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