🏆 Gram Wallet was hiding in plain sight since 2019

⚫️ A few days ago, Pavel Durov sent 100 GRAM to marat.ton, and the owner of the address moved the funds into the new Telegram Wallet almost immediately. We decided to look into who might be behind the wallet and found a likely match in Marat Kharrasov, a designer whose Telegram concepts were featured by the company as far back as 2019.

⚫️ One of his earliest concepts focused on the original Gram Wallet from the Telegram Open Network era. In the video, a user opens an App Store-style marketplace inside Telegram and buys a game with GRAM. The concept looked so convincing that some media outlets mistook it for an official Telegram interface. Telegram later awarded Marat with $5,000 for the work.

⚫️ A few years later, Marat shared another major concept — vertical video with recording, editing, and livestreaming built directly into Telegram. In other words, something very close to what eventually arrived with Stories. We wouldn’t be surprised if work like this got him invited to join Telegram.

⚫️ What’s even more interesting is that the same concept already gave Gram Wallet its own tab in Telegram’s main navigation, alongside Contacts and Messages. Users could also send GRAM tips during livestreams.

🍌 If Telegram is still building on Marat’s old ideas, the next step of MTONGA could easily be a much more prominent Telegram Wallet integration directly into the app. And after that, we may even see new GRAM use cases like tipping during livestreams.

P.S. We posted screenshots from Marat’s old concepts in the comments.

@thedailyton