TON Tech, the infrastructure team behind Telegram’s preferred blockchain TON, has launched AI-powered agents capable of autonomously executing on-chain transactions — transfers, token swaps, staking, and basic portfolio management — without requiring manual approval for each individual action, according to The Block. The feature, called Agentic Wallets, marks one of the more concrete steps yet in turning Telegram bots from tools that talk into tools that actually spend money.
How it works
Users fund a dedicated wallet assigned to a specific AI agent. From there, the agent can act autonomously within that funded balance — executing automated trading strategies within a set budget, participating in DeFi activity, staking, and handling routine portfolio management — all without the agent ever taking custody of the user’s private keys. Ownership stays anchored to the user’s main wallet, and access can reportedly be revoked at any time.
“Agentic Wallets turn AI agents from assistants to actors,” said Andrew Grekov, head of TON Tech, in a statement reported by The Block. “Agents on Telegram can not only communicate, but transact — making payments and interacting with on-chain services on behalf of users, without ever touching their keys.”
That split — agents get narrow, budget-limited permission to act, while the user keeps the master keys — is the core design decision here. It’s less “hand your wallet to a bot” and more “give a bot a sealed envelope with a spending limit written on it.”
Why this launch, and why now
The timing isn’t a coincidence. TON Tech’s announcement came one day after crypto exchange Gemini rolled out its own version of agentic trading, connecting AI models like Claude and ChatGPT directly to user trading accounts so agents can monitor markets and place trades autonomously. Coinbase shipped a similar capability in June with Coinbase for Agents. Taken together, these launches point to a broader “agentic AI” trend spreading across crypto infrastructure — platforms are increasingly comfortable letting AI systems act as economic participants rather than staying limited to advisory or conversational roles.
Inside the Telegram ecosystem specifically, this follows the same pattern we’ve covered with MoonPay’s MoonAgents expansion to Telegram — another crypto-focused AI agent choosing Telegram as a distribution point because of its existing bot infrastructure and scale. TON Tech’s approach differs in one important respect: rather than a third-party app connecting to Telegram as an access layer, this is TON’s own infrastructure team building autonomous transaction capability directly into the blockchain Telegram was built to support.
The context that’s easy to miss: TON activity has actually been declining
One detail worth flagging, and one that a purely celebratory writeup would skip: activity on the TON blockchain has fallen sharply since late 2024, when active addresses briefly exceeded 1 million. According to data cited by The Block, active user numbers have since dropped below 100,000. Launching a flagship new capability during a period of declining network activity reads as much like an attempt to reignite usage as it does a response to overwhelming demand — worth keeping in mind before treating this as evidence of runaway adoption.
What this means if you’re evaluating crypto AI bots on Telegram
A few practical points worth taking from this, beyond the announcement itself:
- “Autonomous” is doing real work in this description. Unlike bots that prepare a transaction and wait for you to confirm it, an agent operating through Agentic Wallets can execute trades and DeFi actions within its budget without a per-action approval step. That’s a meaningfully larger trust decision than a bot that simply drafts a transaction for you to review — worth understanding clearly before funding any agent’s wallet.
- A spending limit is a safeguard, not a guarantee. Budget caps reduce the potential damage from a misbehaving or compromised agent, but they don’t eliminate the risk — a user-defined budget can still be fully spent through bad trades, a bug, or a manipulated instruction. Treat a funded agent wallet the same way you’d treat any account with real transaction authority: fund it only with what you’re prepared to lose.
- This is a fast-moving category. Between MoonPay, Gemini, Coinbase, and now TON Tech, autonomous trading agents are becoming a standard feature across crypto platforms rather than a novelty from one vendor. Expect more Crypto AI tools on Telegram to add similar wallet-level automation going forward — which makes checking exactly what permissions any given bot is requesting more important, not less.
We’ll be tracking how Agentic Wallets performs in practice, and whether other Telegram-based crypto tools adopt a similar budget-capped, non-custodial approach. For more on how to size up a crypto AI bot before connecting a wallet to it, see our guide on what “free” AI tools actually cost you, and browse hands-on tested tools in our Crypto AI category.
