Money, Walt or an external wallet: a practical guide to holding Gram in Telegram
Telegram now offers a self-custodial wallet and a custodial app side by side. How they differ, who controls the keys, and the scams to avoid.
TON & TELEGRAMSECURITY & HACKSANALYSIS
Sofia Marchetti
10/27/20263 min read
Telegram users who want to hold Gram now face a choice that did not exist a few months ago. Money, Telegram's built-in self-custodial wallet, is reaching a much wider audience after access was expanded on October 9. Walt, the custodial app formerly called Wallet in Telegram, continues under its new name with trading features that now include AI agents. And independent wallets on The Open Network still work as before. All three can hold the same token, but they make very different promises about who is in control.
Three models, three sets of trade-offs
Walt is the simplest to start with. It was rebranded from Wallet in Telegram on September 28 and works like an exchange account: the provider holds the assets on your behalf, you log in through Telegram, and if you lose your phone you can recover access through the service. The cost of that convenience is counterparty risk. A custodial provider can suspend withdrawals, freeze accounts to meet compliance requirements, or, in the worst case, fail.
Money takes the opposite approach. Announced in July, opened to selected accounts in August and widened in October, it is non-custodial: the private keys are generated for and held by the user. Telegram cannot see them, cannot reverse a transfer and cannot restore a balance if the recovery phrase is lost. Money handles Gram transfers and purchases of Telegram gifts and collectible usernames, and moving funds from a Walt account into Money is free and immediate, according to reporting on the launch.
External wallets on The Open Network, such as Tonkeeper, offer the same self-custody model outside the Telegram app. They tend to support more tokens and decentralized applications, and they keep your funds independent of any change Telegram might make to its interface or availability in a given country.
Which one fits which use
The practical rule is to match custody to purpose. Small balances used for gifts, tips and paying for channel services fit comfortably in Money, where transfer costs are negligible: network fees fell to roughly 0.0004 Gram, a fraction of a cent, after this year's cuts. Funds intended for active trading sit naturally in a custodial app like Walt, which is built for that purpose, as long as the user accepts that the balance is a claim on the provider. Larger long-term holdings are better kept in a self-custodial wallet whose recovery phrase is stored offline, whether that is Money or an external wallet.
Readers in the European Union should note an extra layer. Firms providing custody or exchange services to EU customers need authorisation under MiCA, so the availability of custodial features can differ by country. Self-custodial software is treated differently from a custodial service, but the on-ramps and off-ramps you use around it are still regulated.
Security basics after the rename
The switch from Toncoin to Gram on June 15 created a predictable wave of scams. The rename required no swap, migration or claim of any kind: balances, addresses, staking positions and tokens carried over one to one automatically. Any message, bot or website asking you to migrate, convert or verify Toncoin to receive Gram is fraudulent. The same applies to anyone claiming to be Telegram support and asking for a recovery phrase. No legitimate service, including Telegram, will ever need it.
Self-custody also shifts the routine work to the user. Write the recovery phrase on paper or a metal plate, keep it away from photos and cloud notes, and test a small transfer before sending a large one. Check the destination address carefully: transfers on The Open Network are final, and address-poisoning tricks, in which an attacker sends a tiny amount from a lookalike address, work here as on other chains.
A word on AI agents
Walt's newest feature lets users connect AI agents, including Telegram's Mira assistant, ChatGPT and Claude, to trade perpetual futures. According to details published on October 20, agents operate only from a dedicated account that the user funds, cannot withdraw or transfer money, have order execution switched off by default, and can be disconnected at any time. Those guardrails limit the damage a misbehaving agent can do, but they do not limit market risk. Leveraged positions can be liquidated, and an agent's confident analysis is not a forecast.
The simplest safe setup is to keep three separate pots: a small spending balance in Money, a trading balance you can afford to lose in Walt, and savings in a self-custodial wallet you rarely touch. That structure keeps the convenience of Telegram's new tools while limiting how much any single failure, human or software, can cost.