Telegram Applies for .gram Domain to Give Users Personal Websites

Telegram has applied to ICANN for a new top-level domain, .gram, a move that would allow its nearly one billion users to turn their usernames into personal web addresses.

Founder Pavel Durov announced the application on his Telegram channel. He gave examples of @muqadus and @fatima becoming domains, such as muqadus.gram and fatima.gram.

If approved, .gram would work with familiar domain extensions like .com or .org, except it would be specifically reserved for Telegram-related addresses.

Users can not just claim the address, Durov said, but they can also create and host interactive websites directly through commands within Telegram.

According to Durov, a single AI prompt would be enough to create one of these websites without requiring coding knowledge.

The application came during ICANN’s 2026 application round, the first window of its kind to open since 2012. That window closed on August 12 after running for 15 weeks, during which ICANN counted more than 1,600 primary applications, plus another 1,100 applications for backup domain strings.

That means .gram is currently sitting in a fairly crowded queue, and there’s no guarantee it will be approved at all. ICANN is expected to publish its list of cleared domain strings by mid-October, and even if .gram makes it through, any public rollout seems unlikely before 2027.

The name itself holds some history. Gram was originally the name of the token associated with the Telegram Open Network, a blockchain project Telegram launched in 2017 and then abandoned in 2020 when the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission sued to block its token sale. The project eventually became an independent community effort now known as the TON blockchain.

The token associated with it has also gone through its own names. It was rebranded from Gram to Toncoin as the community took over development, then changed back to Gram in mid-2026.

It’s worth noting that the .gram domain plan is separate from TON’s current naming system, which allows users to register names associated with their Telegram accounts or channels.

The .gram proposal instead follows a more traditional path, going through ICANN and managed directly by Telegram rather than sitting on the TON blockchain.

On the market side, the gram token is not having the easiest time. It was trading around $1.32 at last check, with a market capitalization of around $3.65 billion, sitting well below its June 2024 high of $8.25.

The registration is also yet to be confirmed. If .gram gets approved, how users can claim it hasn’t been publicly disclosed in detail yet.