Telegram Gifts: A Beginner's Guide to NFTs on TON

NFT gifts on Telegram are limited collectible gifts you can upgrade into unique NFTs on the TON blockchain, then send, store, and trade from your own wallet.

What Are Telegram Gifts?

Telegram gifts are animated digital presents you send in chats and pay for with Telegram Stars, the app’s in-app currency. The idea is not new for founder Pavel Durov: his earlier social network VK (VKontakte) had virtual gifts long before Telegram. Telegram launched its own gifts on October 5, 2024, and users exchanged around 20 million of them in the first holiday season alone (per Durov, January 2025). You can send a gift in any chat, show it on your profile next to your name, and turn a collectible one into a real NFT.

Types of Telegram Gifts: Standard and Collectible

Telegram gifts come in two official types based on supply:

• Standard Gifts: Unlimited animated items - hearts, a thumbs-up, cakes, flowers - starting at 15 Stars and going up to a few thousand Stars for the priciest. You can send as many as you want, but they do not live on a blockchain and cannot be traded.
• Collectible Gifts: Released by the Telegram team in a limited supply, each with its own unique attributes. Only these can be upgraded into an NFT, transferred, or sold.

On a profile, the Gifts tab has a filter that sorts gifts by whether they come from a limited or unlimited collection.

Left and center: standard and collectible Telegram gifts. Right: a Durov’s Cap collectible showing its Model, Symbol, and Backdrop traits with rarity. Source: Telegram

How Limited Gift Drops Work

A limited drop is a timed release: a new collection opens for purchase at an announced time, usually with three or four different gifts tied to one event, and it can sell out in minutes. Some collections require a Telegram Premium subscription or cap how many you can buy per account, which adds to the rush. Telegram has run these around holidays (Santa Hat, Homemade Cake, Jelly Bunny, Spiced Wine) and around major events: the Snoop Dogg drop sold about 1 million gifts and made roughly $12 million in 30 minutes, Khabib Nurmagomedov’s papakha sold 29,000 units for around $4.5 million, and Durov’s Cap started near $15 and climbed far higher.

The flagship example is Plush Pepe: one of the first upgradeable gifts and now the rarest, with a supply of about 3,000 (some burned) and a floor near 5,000 Gram - the native token of TON, renamed from Toncoin on June 15, 2026 - roughly $15,000 as of July 2026. Everyone who bought the plush frog started with the same item; after upgrades, some became far rarer than others.

Top Plush Pepe sales, each with different traits - for example Gummy Frog, Platinum, Ring. Source: Fragment

Telegram’s NFT gifts are not the JPEG mania of OpenSea in 2021. They have a real use - people actually send them, wear them on their profile, and use them inside a messenger with close to a billion users - which is a big reason the Telegram gift market held up even as the broader NFT market cooled.

How a Gift Becomes an NFT (Upgrade)

At first the gift is the same for everyone - say 2,000 people all hold the same Plush Pepe, Pet Snake, or Pool Float. After a while, an “upgrade” option opens, and you separately buy the conversion into an NFT with Telegram Stars - usually about 25 Stars, sometimes up to 100 depending on the collection. This upgrade fee is separate from the auctions used to distribute brand-new gift releases.

When you upgrade, Telegram rolls a random combination of four traits:

• Model: The main look of the gift.
• Backdrop: The background color and pattern.
• Symbol: A small icon layered over the gift.
• Number: The mint number of that copy.

Because it is random, the upgrade is a surprise reveal: you might land a rare, valuable combination, or a common one worth less than the upgrade itself. The NFT version is brighter and more animated than the plain gift, but the combination you get is not always a good fit. You do not have to upgrade everything - you decide which gifts to turn into an NFT.

How Telegram’s New-Gift Auctions Work

Brand-new gift releases are distributed through auctions. You bid Telegram Stars over several rounds; each round’s top bidders win a gift, lower bids carry over to the next round, and any leftover bids are refunded. Your place sets your gift’s number - the Round 1 top bidder gets #1, second place gets #2, and so on. So the price climbs as people compete, and the highest, earliest bids land the lowest, most desirable numbers.

What Is a TON NFT?

An NFT on TON is a non-fungible token recorded on The Open Network, the blockchain built for Telegram: anyone can verify who owns it, and only you control it. Every collectible gift first lives inside Telegram’s own system, not on the blockchain - it simply sits in the Gifts tab on your profile. The moment you send it on-chain, it becomes a regular TON NFT (built on the TEP-62 standard) that trades on open marketplaces.

How to Turn a Telegram Gift into an NFT: Step by Step

To turn a Telegram gift into an NFT, you go through four steps - from buying a limited gift to holding it in your own wallet:

1. Buy a Limited Gift: During a drop, buy a limited collectible gift in the Telegram app with Telegram Stars.
2. Upgrade to an NFT: When the upgrade option opens, pay a small fee (around 25 Stars) to convert the gift into an NFT.
3. Move It On-Chain: Send the upgraded gift over the TON blockchain to your Gram Wallet - for example Gem Wallet, a self-custody, fully open-source wallet for the TON ecosystem and 100+ other blockchains - and it appears in the Collections tab.
4. Manage Your NFT: The gift now lives in your wallet - keep it, set it as your wallet avatar, or sell it on Fragment or the built-in marketplace (tap Sell, set a price; the buyer pays in Gram, and swapping Stars for Gram on Fragment needs identity verification, KYC).

A Telegram NFT gift moved into Gem Wallet.

Once it is in Gem Wallet, you can hold your Telegram NFT gifts, send Gram, and stake Gram for rewards - privately and securely, with full control over your assets.