On August 18, 2026, Pavel Durov posted a 44-word message on X: "Telegram has applied for the.gram domain zone." According to him, if ICANN approves, a billion Telegram users will be able to obtain their own second-level domains of the form yourname.gram and, with a single request, create interactive websites hosted by Telegram. By mid-September, the post had gathered tens of thousands of likes and several thousand reposts; Durov provided no other public details of the application.
ICANN does not disclose who applied for what until "Reveal Day" — the moment when the public portions of all applications that have passed administrative review are published. ICANN promised to announce the exact date in mid-September, and the publication itself is to take place no later than nine weeks after the application window closed on August 12 — that is, roughly by mid-October. Until then, as one industry blog put it, everyone is "arguing about shadows."
Two different.grams
Two months before ICANN's announcement, in June 2026, the domain durov.gram was put up for sale on GetGems — an NFT marketplace on the TON blockchain — with an asking price of $1.7 million. This reflects the speculative market for "domains" within TON: wallet.ton and casino.ton sold at auctions for $200,000–260,000, and a premium Telegram username sold for $2.4 million on the Fragment platform. However, that.gram is a collectible NFT in the intra-network TON naming system, unrelated to ICANN and the global DNS.
The GRAM ZONE Community channel, which covers this market, responded to Durov's tweet with a post that gathered more than 5,900 views: such addresses, it said, "have long existed in Gram DNS, and durov.gram was bought there long before this application — for a substantial sum." The channel expressed hope that Telegram would "civilly buy out the legendary names from those who believed in Gram earlier" rather than simply overwrite them.
Competitor and technical partner
Link Freedom Group — the Maltese operator behind the.link registry from Nova Registry, which submitted the largest batch of applications in ICANN history (316 strings, about $71.7 million in fees) — lists.gram in its public namespace browser under the "Lifestyle" category with examples photo.gram, dia.gram, and weight.gram. Under the 2026 rules, private settlement of competing applications is prohibited: if both reach Reveal Day, the dispute will be decided by an ICANN auction, and the loser will forfeit about $147,550 of the $227,000 estimated fee.
Unstoppable Domains, which is described as Telegram's registry services provider, abandoned its own gTLD plans in web3 at the end of August. On August 26, the company's founder, Matthew Gould, confirmed that it would not apply for.crypto,.wallet,.nft, and similar extensions, concluding: "the cost of running web3 domains through ICANN — in terms of compliance, applications, and auctions — is higher than what we estimate we would recoup from sales." In the same week, Gould separately confirmed that Unstoppable continues to work with Telegram on.gram. Telegram has not published a technical description of the project — access rules, pricing, architecture.
Reviews and legal background
Final approval is given by ICANN's Board of Directors, but substantive decisions are made by other bodies. Independent evaluators check finances and technology against fixed criteria. The WIPO Arbitration and Mediation Center, the sole provider of objections based on legal rights and string confusion in the 2026 round, issues binding expert determinations. The Governmental Advisory Committee, representing about 180 states, can issue early warnings and consensus recommendations, which ICANN's bylaws require to be given a strong presumption of deference. The due diligence review is conducted under a "crimes of trust" standard borrowed from banking regulation and covers the applicant, its directors, officers, and major shareholders.
The French case against Durov remains open; he himself describes his status with the words "I am not in the dock," not "acquitted." In July 2026, Russia's FSB charged him under an anti-terrorism article, alleging that Telegram had not removed channels that Ukrainian intelligence allegedly used to coordinate attacks inside Russia, and sought his arrest through Interpol under an article carrying up to 15 years. Telegram's official X account responded with a photo of Durov raising his middle finger. Since April 1, 2026, Telegram has been fully blocked in Russia.
According to CircleID's assessment, public charges alone do not disqualify an application, since ICANN's wording appears designed for convictions rather than pending cases. But they give at least two governments — France because of the case concerning materials of sexual violence against children and Russia because of the terrorism case — an incentive to file an early warning with the GAC against the same application.
The publication also recalls security risks: according to a study by Interisle Consulting, new gTLDs account for about 12% of the domain market but 47% of all registered cybercrime domains. A separate analysis of 2025 registrations estimated the share of malicious actors among registrations in new gTLDs at 10–20%.
Separately, CircleID cites a 2025 iStories publication alleging that Russian network engineer Vladimir Vedeneyev controls a significant portion of Telegram's actual IP infrastructure, maintaining contact with an FSB handler within the SORM system. Vedeneyev told iStories: "They say: 'We need this IP at this time. Who is it?' … We answer quickly." Vedeneyev disputed this characterization and filed a lawsuit in Switzerland demanding the removal of the interview, but not contesting the underlying facts. The independent technical firm Symbolic Software, having examined the claims, confirmed them: Telegram transmits a persistent unencrypted device identifier, which "creates the technical possibility of tracking the device by any entity with passive network access." Telegram spokesperson Remi Vaughn called the FSB connection a "conspiracy theory" and stated that no company associated with Vedeneyev has serviced Telegram's European-Russian data center since 2021. Both positions are on the public record, and neither has been independently examined by a court.
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