Telegram Gift NFT Sells for $20,000 as Pavel Durov Backs Young Coders
A free coding trophy simply become roughly $20,000 after a US high faculty pupil offered his Telegram Gift NFT for 15,000 Grams. Pavel Durov held the sale up as startup cash.
The worth cleared about 40 instances what Telegram assured the typical prize was value. Durov posted the end result on his channel and urged different winners to go construct one thing.
How a Free Prize Became $20,000
Jonathan He gained gold on the 2026 International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI). Durov ranked him seventh on the earth.
Instead of the same old medal or cheque, the prize was an Algorithm Cup, a digital collectible that lives on TON, the blockchain behind Gram. Winners can promote theirs to anybody.
Jonathan He competes for Team USA and interns as an engineer at buying and selling agency Liquid. He sat fifth after Day 1 on 246 factors out of 300, co-founder Franklyn Wang mentioned.
Telegram promised the 235 medalists a mixed $117,000 in Algorithm Cups. That averages near $500 a cup. One of them offered for 40 instances that.
Gram (GRAM), the token rebranded from Toncoin in June, traded close to $1.36 on Sunday. That places 15,000 Grams at about $20,400.
Durov Calls It Seed Money
Pavel Durov highlighted the sale in a Sunday submit on Telegram, calling on different winners to place their Grams to comparable use.
“…20 years in the past, $20K was sufficient for me to launch my first firm. Within months, it had reached 1M customers and raised $12M at a $60M valuation,” he wrote.
That firm was VKontakte. Durov left the Russian social community in 2014, then constructed Telegram, the corporate that handed out this 12 months’s cups.
He now buys these collectibles himself. In June, he paid 7,500 Grams for a Plush Pepe NFT, his third such buy since December 2025. The teenager’s cup fetched twice as many Grams.
Gram has misplaced 56% of its worth over the previous 12 months. A Telegram collectible nonetheless cleared $20,000. The purchaser and {the marketplace} stay undisclosed.
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