Telegram reaches more than a billion people every month6. Since Oct. 20, the crypto app that lives inside it has let a chatbot trade for them2.
That app is Walt, called Wallet in Telegram until Sept. 283. A Walt user can now connect ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, Cursor or another AI agent to a trading account2. Mira, an assistant that runs right inside Telegram, works too. The agent trades perpetual futures, crypto contracts that run until the trader closes them, usually on borrowed money.
Scale is the story here. Walt counted more than 150 million registered users when it switched on perps in April4. Telegram's own wallet, now called Money, is rolling out to the messenger's audience of over a billion people, Walt's news channel reported on Oct. 95. Walt's agent accounts sit inside the same app as that crowd.
Oct. 20, 2026: Walt's 150 million users sit inside Telegram's 1 billion
People, one cube per million: Telegram's monthly users, with Walt's and Mira's users lit
- Walt's registered users: 150 million
- Mira's users: 2 million
- Rest of Telegram's monthly users: 848 million
- Each cube is 1 million
Sources: Walt [1]; Walt [4]; TechCrunch [6].
Read the chart as a table
| Item | Value | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Walt's registered users | 150 million | Reported at the April 2, 2026 perps launch |
| Mira's users | 2 million | More than 2 million; Walt says the two counts may overlap |
| Whole | 1,000 million, each cube 1 million |
Walt calls the agent launch the third of five "Walt Street" updates rolling out this month2. The CryptoLately.com Desk sent Walt five questions about it. Alex Kralkin, Walt's director of wealth and investment, answered each one in writing1. His answers appear below in full. They describe a separate account, an off switch and a leverage ceiling that moves with each market.
How a Chatbot Gets a Walt Account
The connection runs on MCP, short for Model Context Protocol. Anthropic open-sourced it on Nov. 25, 2024, as “a new standard for connecting AI assistants to the systems where data lives”9. A service publishes an MCP server, and an assistant that speaks the protocol can use it.
“ChatGPT and Claude connect through MCP, the open protocol that lets AI assistants talk to external services,” Kralkin said1. “The user adds Walt’s MCP server in the assistant’s settings and authorizes the connection from their Walt account.”
Linking takes two steps, then. The user adds the server inside ChatGPT or Claude, and approves the link inside Walt. Walt's channel lists the steps on its side: open Walt, tap "Create AI agent account," pick an agent and connect it2.
What can the agent touch once it is in? One account, and only the money in it.
“The assistant works only with a dedicated trading account, separate from the user’s main Walt wallet,” Kralkin said1. “The user decides how much to fund it with. The assistant cannot access funds outside that account.”
The agent also starts unable to place orders. "Order execution is off by default," Kralkin said1. “The assistant can place trades only after the user turns that permission on.” Walt's own launch post adds a second check: the agent "places every trade only once you confirm"2.
Andrew Rogozov, founder and chief executive of The Open Platform and Walt, sketched the job in his Sept. 28 letter. AI-powered trading, he wrote, would help users "analyze markets, assess portfolio risk, discover opportunities, and execute perpetuals"3. Walt's launch post put it in plainer words. The agent helps a user “get the picture on the market, open a position and check your portfolio risk in one chat, without switching screens”2.
Both sides, in their own words
Can a separate account keep an agent's mistakes small?
“ChatGPT and Claude connect through MCP, the open protocol that lets AI assistants talk to external services”
“If you have one agent that handles your personal schedule, that handles your family schedule, that handles your trips … and on top of it gives you advice on your crypto, that’s not just going to be confusing for the agent. It’s going to be confusing for you”
Lighter Fills the Orders, at 3x to 50x
Walt does the talking, and Lighter does the matching. "Yes. Walt executes trades through Lighter, and Lighter fills the orders," Kralkin said1.
Lighter calls itself a decentralized trading platform, and says it is the first exchange to offer verifiable order matching and liquidations10. Walt plugged it in on April 2. That launch opened more than 50 markets, from Bitcoin and TON to oil, metals, stocks and ETFs4. Lighter's founder, named in the release only as Vlad, explained the appeal in one line about distribution.
"Telegram is one of the largest messaging platforms in the world," he said4. “We are excited to partner with Wallet to make perpetual futures trading as simple as sending a message.”
How much borrowed money can an agent use? Walt's answer is a range.
"Maximum leverage varies by asset, from 3x to 50x," Kralkin said1. “It depends on each market’s liquidity: deeper markets allow higher leverage, thinner markets get lower caps. The user sees the applicable limit for each asset before placing a trade.”
Leverage turns a small deposit, the margin, into a big position. At 50x, a trader puts up 2 percent of the position's value. A 2 percent move the wrong way can erase that margin, before fees. The cushion grows as leverage falls: 5 percent at 20x, 10 percent at 10x and about 33 percent at 3x.
Oct. 20, 2026: at Walt's 50x cap, a 2% move against a trade can erase its margin
Price move that erases a position's margin, by leverage, before fees
- Walt's top cap, 50x: 2%
- Lower leverage levels
Source: Walt [1].
Read the chart as a table
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| 3x | 33% |
| 10x | 10% |
| 20x | 5% |
| 50x | 2% |
Regulators read those numbers too. In March 2018, Europe's securities watchdog limited retail contracts for difference on cryptocurrencies to 2:112. Walt's ceiling for its deepest markets runs 25 times higher. Its launch post carries the line "Investments in crypto are risky" and says the message is meant for people outside the United Kingdom2.
What It Costs, and Who Gets It
Many brokers charge extra for automation. Walt skipped that step.
"The AI trading feature carries no additional fee," Kralkin said1. “It is available at launch to all Walt users. Standard perpetuals trading fees apply to trades as they do today.”
That choice ties Walt's income to the trades an agent places, through the fees it already collects. More agents placing more orders means more fee revenue for the same product.
Walt sized that market in April. Perpetual futures volume grew more than 300 percent in 2025 and approached $8 trillion for the year, the company said4. By April, it added, monthly activity topped $1 trillion. Those are Walt's figures, offered to explain why it brought perps into Telegram at all.
The Day $19 Billion Vanished
Every leveraged product now gets measured against one Friday. On Oct. 10, 2025, a tariff threat hit crypto markets11. By late that night, more than $19 billion in positions had been wiped out. More than 1.6 million traders were liquidated, PYMNTS reported, citing CoinGlass data.
So what stops an agent from walking into a day like that? Kralkin answered in two parts.
"The agent’s reach is limited by design," he said1. “It trades from an isolated account, separate from the user’s main Walt balance, and it can only trade the funds the user put into that account. It cannot withdraw or transfer funds. The most a user can lose through the agent is what they chose to fund it with.”
The second part is control. “Order execution is off by default, and the user turns it on,” Kralkin said1. “Users set the agent’s instructions and trading parameters, can monitor its activity, and can disconnect it at any time.”
Read the promise closely. The pledge caps the loss at the deposit. How fast an agent can lose that deposit at 50x stays an open question.
Telegram's Crowd
Why build a trading app inside a messenger? Rogozov answered that in April, when perps went live. “Perpetual trading has traditionally been intimidating for retail users, requiring complex UIs and moving funds to sophisticated exchanges,” he said4. “By integrating Lighter directly into Wallet, we are making advanced leveraged trading simple and accessible where millions of users already communicate and hold crypto.”
Walt itself began as a bot. “Five years ago, we launched a simple wallet bot that made it easy to buy Toncoin and Bitcoin for Telegram users,” Rogozov wrote in his September letter3. The bot grew into a full trading app, and the name shrank. "The product got bigger, the name got shorter," he wrote.
The rename also split the work. Telegram's Gram wallet took the simple job in the messenger's settings, and Walt kept trading, investing and earn products. Rogozov called Gram's wallet "the entry point for 1 billion users" and Walt the next step.
That billion is Telegram's own count. Pavel Durov, Telegram's founder, said on March 19, 2025, that the app had passed 1 billion monthly active users6. A year earlier, Telegram reported 950 million.
Mira grew up on the same platform. The Open Platform launched it on Feb. 9, 2026, as an AI assistant built to run inside Telegram7. It runs on Cocoon, a confidential computing network built on TON.
By June 7, Mira's profile counter read 1,167,762 monthly users8. Its team credited Telegram itself, which it says "has since opened up natively to AI agents." Group chats did the rest. “More than a third of our new users first meet Mira inside a shared group, watching her summarize a thread or pull action items out of a messy conversation before they ever message her on their own,” the Mira team wrote.
The February launch prompted the fifth question: how many Walt users have turned Mira on? Kralkin declined to merge the two crowds.
"Walt doesn’t hold data on how many Walt users use Mira," he said1. “Mira is a separate product with more than 2 million users, but that figure is not a count of Walt users, and the two shouldn’t be conflated.”
The Case For and the Case Against
Kralkin made the case for: a deposit-sized loss, an off switch and leverage tied to depth. His sharpest line names the ceiling on the damage. “The most a user can lose through the agent is what they chose to fund it with,” he said1.
Yat Siu, chairman of Animoca Brands, made the case against on Oct. 20, in an interview Yohan Yun reported for Cointelegraph from Token2049 Singapore13. His own agent got so focused on crypto that it read unrelated questions as crypto questions.
“If you have one agent that handles your personal schedule, that handles your family schedule, that handles your trips … and on top of it gives you advice on your crypto, that’s not just going to be confusing for the agent. It’s going to be confusing for you,” Siu said13.
Siu also warned that a thousand people asking AI about the same trade could get roughly the same answer. He wants owners to keep their agent's memory portable. “At minimum, you have the right to download your data so that you can basically transfer it somewhere else so that another agent might be able to take over,” he said.
Kralkin's case holds if the separate account and the off switch keep each loss to the deposit. Siu's case holds if many agents read the same market the same way, at the same moment. Each reader decides which risk matters more.
By the numbers
- 1 billion: Telegram's monthly active users, per Pavel Durov on March 19, 20256.
- 150 million: registered users Walt reported when it launched perps on April 24.
- 3x to 50x: the leverage range on Walt's perps, set by each market's liquidity1.
- 2 percent: the price move that can erase a 50x position's margin, before fees.
- $19 billion: positions wiped out on Oct. 10, 2025, per CoinGlass data11.
- 1,167,762: Mira's monthly users on its profile counter on June 78.
- 201 days: from Walt's perps launch on April 2 to its agent launch on Oct. 20.
Oct. 20, 2026: Walt's AI agents arrived 201 days after its perps launch
Dated steps from Mira's launch to agents trading on Walt, per Walt and The Open Platform
Read the chart as a table
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| Feb. 9, 2026 | Mira launches in Telegram. An AI assistant built for Telegram |
| April 2, 2026 | Perps launch at 50x. Lighter fills the orders |
| Sept. 28, 2026 | Wallet becomes Walt. Rogozov's letter promises AI trading |
| Oct. 9, 2026 | Telegram's Money wallet. Rolling out to over a billion people |
| Oct. 20, 2026 | Agents trade on Walt. ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, Cursor or Mira |
What to watch
Adoption is the first number to watch. Walt reports user counts at launches4. A count of funded agent accounts would show how many of its 150 million registered users hand a chatbot the trade. Leverage is the second: lower caps on thin markets would show the liquidity rule at work. The third is Telegram itself. Its Money rollout puts a wallet in front of over a billion people, and Walt sits one tap away5. Readers who want the AI side of the story can read AI Lately's version, which explains the MCP link for people new to crypto.
Sources
- Alex Kralkin, "Written answers to questions from CryptoLately," Walt, Oct. 20, 2026.
- Walt, "Your AI perps assistant on Walt Street · 3/5," Walt News on Telegram, Oct. 20, 2026, https://t.me/walt_news/889
- Andrew Rogozov, "Wallet becomes Walt: a letter from Andrew Rogozov," Walt, Sept. 28, 2026, https://walt.io/news/a-letter-from-andrew-rogozov-ceo-and-founder-top
- Walt, "Wallet launches perpetual futures for 150M+ users with Lighter," Walt, April 2, 2026, https://walt.io/news/wallet-in-telegram-launches-perpetual-futures-for-150-m-users-with-lighter
- Walt, "Telegram is launching its wallet for everyone," Walt News on Telegram, Oct. 9, 2026, https://t.me/walt_news/883
- Ivan Mehta, "Telegram founder Pavel Durov says app now has 1B users, calls WhatsApp a 'cheap, watered-down imitation'," TechCrunch, March 19, 2025, https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/19/telegram-founder-pavel-durov-says-app-now-has-1b-users-calls-whatsapp-a-cheap-watered-down-imitation/
- The Open Platform, "Mira is the first Cocoon-powered AI assistant in Telegram," The Open Platform, Feb. 9, 2026, https://top.co/insights/mira-ai-assistant-telegram
- Mira, "Mira Just Crossed 1 Million Monthly Users Inside Telegram," Mira, June 7, 2026, https://mira.tg/blog/mira-1-million-monthly-users
- Anthropic, "Introducing the Model Context Protocol," Anthropic, Nov. 25, 2024, https://www.anthropic.com/news/model-context-protocol
- Lighter, "Introduction," Lighter Docs, accessed Oct. 20, 2026, https://docs.lighter.xyz/
- PYMNTS, "Tariff Threat Triggers Record $19 Billion in Crypto Liquidations," PYMNTS, Oct. 12, 2025, https://www.pymnts.com/cryptocurrency/2025/tariffs-trigger-record-19-billion-in-crypto-liquidations/
- ESMA, "ESMA agrees to prohibit binary options and restrict CFDs to protect retail investors," European Securities and Markets Authority, March 27, 2018, https://www.esma.europa.eu/press-news/esma-news/esma-agrees-prohibit-binary-options-and-restrict-cfds-protect-retail-investors
- Yohan Yun, "Agents can trade 24/7 — but Yat Siu warns you could lose access at any time," Cointelegraph Magazine, Oct. 20, 2026, https://cointelegraph.com/magazine/ai-trade-sleep-yat-siu-warns-losing-agent