A free coding trophy just turned into roughly $20,000 after a US high school student sold his Telegram Gift NFT for 15,000 Grams. Pavel Durov held the sale up as startup money.

The price cleared about 40 times what Telegram guaranteed the average prize was worth. Durov posted the result on his channel and urged other winners to go build something.

How a Free Prize Became $20,000

Jonathan He won gold at the 2026 International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI). Durov ranked him seventh in the world.

Instead of the usual medal or cheque, the prize was an Algorithm Cup, a digital collectible that lives on TON, the blockchain behind Gram. Winners can sell theirs to anyone.

Jonathan He competes for Team USA and interns as an engineer at trading firm Liquid. He sat fifth after Day 1 on 246 points out of 300, co-founder Franklyn Wang said.

Telegram promised the 235 medalists a combined $117,000 in Algorithm Cups. That averages close to $500 a cup. One of them sold for 40 times that.

Gram (GRAM), the token rebranded from Toncoin in June, traded near $1.36 on Sunday. That puts 15,000 Grams at about $20,400.

Durov Calls It Seed Money

Pavel Durov highlighted the sale in a Sunday post on Telegram, calling on other winners to put their Grams to similar use.

“…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. Durov left the Russian social network in 2014, then built Telegram, the company that handed out this year’s cups.

He now buys these collectibles himself. In June, he paid 7,500 Grams for a Plush Pepe NFT, his third such purchase since December 2025. The teenager’s cup fetched twice as many Grams.

Gram has lost 56% of its value over the past year. A Telegram collectible still cleared $20,000. The buyer and the marketplace remain undisclosed.

Source: BeInCrypto