July 2026 was the first full month of our continuous on-chain tracking of the Telegram username market: 27,370 recorded sales totaling about 2.22 million GRAM (formerly TON), roughly $2.9M at today's GRAM price. The headline sale was @polymarket at 354,900 GRAM, the largest username sale since February's @danbao record. And the market's shape is a steep pyramid: fewer than 1% of sales produced almost 70% of the money.
This report is now published quarterly. The Q3 2026 edition covers July to September 2026, with month-by-month figures, the quarter's top sales and bid-war data.
In September 2026 we imported the complete on-chain history of every Telegram username, which surfaced sales our tracker had not recorded because it had not yet picked up those names. With them, July 2026 comes to 33,020 sales and about 2.67 million GRAM, not the 27,370 sales and 2.22 million GRAM reported below. The largest sale, @polymarket at 354,900 GRAM, is unchanged. The rest of this report is left as originally published; the corrected monthly figures are open data at NameSniper Research.
Telegram usernames trade as collectibles on the TON blockchain through Fragment, the auction platform where Telegram's collectible usernames are bought and sold, which means every sale settles in public with a readable price. We index those records continuously. This is the first edition of our monthly market report: what actually sold in July 2026, for how much, and what the shape of the market says about where the value sits.
All figures below are recorded on-chain sales with July 2026 transaction times. Dollar figures use today's GRAM price of about $1.33 and move with the token. Sales completed through private flows may carry no readable on-chain price and are not counted.
The month's top sales
The @polymarket sale is the one to sit with. It is a live company's exact brand name, and it went to whoever paid the most in a public auction. Whether the buyer was the company or a speculator, the mechanics are the same lesson: on Telegram, your brand name is a tradable asset with a market price, and if you have not secured it, someone can simply buy it.
The market is a pyramid
Group July's 27,370 sales by price and the distribution is stark:
- Under 50 GRAM: 24,503 sales (89.5% of all sales) producing 267,869 GRAM - just 12% of volume. This is the floor of the market: minimum-bid claims and small speculative buys.
- 50 to 999 GRAM: 2,635 sales producing about 404,000 GRAM - the working middle of the market, around 18% of volume.
- 1,000 GRAM and up: just 232 sales (0.85% of all sales) producing 1,548,289 GRAM - 69.7% of all volume. Seven of those sales cleared 10,000 GRAM each.
Fewer than one sale in a hundred carried the market. This is why "average sale price" (81 GRAM in July) is a nearly useless number for this market, and why we report the distribution instead.
Length economics: the 4-letter premium, quantified
- 4-letter names: 183 sales, 1,062,060 GRAM volume, average 5,804 GRAM per sale. That is 0.67% of sales producing 47.8% of all volume.
- 5-letter names: 7,337 sales (the most active length) at an average of just 27.6 GRAM.
- 6+ letters: averages settle in the 20-40 GRAM range, with occasional brand-name spikes (@polymarket single-handedly made 10-letter names July's second-biggest length by volume).
The cliff between 4 and 5 letters is the entire story of scarcity pricing: 4-letter names average roughly 200x the sale price of 5-letter names. Length is not a linear discount; it is a different asset class.
Every figure in this report comes from public TON blockchain records: sales settled through Fragment's on-chain auction contracts with July 2026 transaction times. We index these records continuously and publish per-name histories - every price on our market pages traces to an on-chain transaction. Historical prices are facts about past transactions, not valuations or predictions. NameSniper is not affiliated with Telegram or Fragment.
What this means if you want a name
The pyramid has practical implications. The floor of the market is genuinely accessible: nearly 25,000 names changed hands in July for under 50 GRAM (about $66) each. The middle - real words, short handles, brandable names - trades in the hundreds of GRAM. And the top is a scarce-asset market where 4-letter and brand-exact names command five to six figures in dollars.
If a name you want is sitting in someone's hands or heading to auction, the market moves without an announcement. You can check any Telegram username's price history, and watch a name to get alerted once a scheduled check confirms it lists, its price moves, or it becomes claimable.
If you are hunting a kind of name rather than one specific name, Fragment auction alerts message you in Telegram when a matching auction gets its first bid or is about to end. You set the length, the characters, a word it should contain and your budget.
We now publish this report quarterly, starting with the Q3 2026 edition. The live market tracker updates continuously in between.
Use this data. The figures and files behind this piece are open under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. Quote or chart them freely, with a credit and link to NameSniper Research.