From Olympiad Code to On-Chain Gold: A Telegram Cup Just Outshone Its $500 Promise by 40x

A digital trophy handed out by Telegram at the world's top coding competition has sold for roughly $20,000 on the TON blockchain, clearing the average value of its sibling prizes by about 40 times. The seller was Jonathan He, a US high schooler and engineering intern at trading firm Liquid, who placed seventh at the 2026 International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI). The buyer and the marketplace have not been disclosed.

He was one of 235 medalists at IOI 2026, where Franklyn Wang, co-founder of Liquid, said the intern sat fifth after Day 1 on 246 points out of 300. Telegram had guaranteed the cohort a combined $117,000 in Algorithm Cups, working out to an average of close to $500 a cup. He sold his for 15,000 Grams at a Sunday market price near $1.36 per GRAM, according to BeInCrypto data, putting the proceeds at about $20,400.

Pavel Durov, the founder of Telegram, flagged the sale in a Sunday post on his channel and used the moment to urge fellow winners toward entrepreneurship. "20 years ago, $20K was enough for me to launch my first company. Within months, it had reached 1M users and raised $12M at a $60M valuation," he wrote. That company was VKontakte, the Russian social network Durov left in 2014 before going on to build Telegram, the issuer of this year's cups.

Durov has emerged as an active collector of the same Telegram-issued digital assets, including a Plush Pepe NFT he acquired in June for 7,500 Grams — his third such purchase since December 2025. The teenager's Algorithm Cup fetched exactly twice that amount. Gram, the token rebranded from Toncoin in June, has lost 56% of its value over the past year, a decline that did not stop one Telegram collectible from changing hands at five-figure territory.