Telegram Gifts Glossary: 26 Terms

This glossary defines twenty-six terms around Telegram gifts, Stars and gift games. A Telegram gift is a digital item one user sends another, bought with Stars. Some can be upgraded into a unique collectible that can be traded or exported to the TON blockchain, while Stars themselves can't be cashed out by ordinary users. Terms with a specific meaning inside Gift Club say so.

What are gifts on Telegram? Gifts on Telegram are digital items one user sends another, bought with Stars and shown on the recipient's profile. An ordinary gift is decorative and can be converted back to Stars for less than it cost; some can be upgraded into a unique collectible that lives on the TON blockchain and can be traded.

1. The Telegram gift economy

These terms are Telegram's, not ours — they mean the same thing in any app.

Mini App

A web app that runs inside Telegram rather than being installed from an app store. Gift Club is a Mini App: there is nothing to download, and it opens from a Telegram link.

Telegram Stars

Telegram's in-app currency, bought through Telegram's own payment flow and spent on digital goods inside bots and Mini Apps. Stars are not a cryptocurrency and ordinary users cannot cash them out to a bank account.

TON

The Open Network, the blockchain associated with Telegram. Its coin is Gram (formerly Toncoin). Collectible gifts exported out of Telegram live on TON, and some purchases can be paid in Gram instead of Stars.

Telegram Gift

A digital item one Telegram user sends another, bought with Stars. An ordinary gift is decorative; some can be upgraded into a collectible.

Collectible gift (NFT gift)

A Telegram gift that has been upgraded into a unique, tradable item with its own attributes and serial number. Once upgraded it can be transferred, sold, or exported to a TON wallet.

Gift upgrade

The one-way conversion of a standard gift into a collectible. Upgrading assigns randomised attributes — model, backdrop, symbol — and cannot be reversed.

Floor price

The lowest price any seller currently asks for a given collectible on a marketplace. It is a snapshot of supply, not an appraisal, and it moves.

2. Inside Gift Club

These have a specific meaning in this app. Prices and reward values are the ones currently live.

Box

A container of randomised prizes. Gift Club has six paid in Stars: Wooden (10 Stars), Stars (25), Gifts (25), Sci-fi (30), Pumpkin Latte (100) and Magical (120). The Spark box opens for 10 Sparks from the daily streak, and four Gram boxes (Geode, Orbit, Vault and Whale, 1 to 10 GRAM) pay their prizes in Gram.

Rarity band

The tier a prize sits in, from common upward. Gift Club shows every possible prize in a box and its rarity band before you open it; numeric per-item probabilities are not published.

Scratch card

A paid instant-win card. You pick a design, scratch it, and the result — Stars, a gift, or a multiplier — is revealed immediately, with no box-opening step.

XP

Experience points, earned by playing. XP raises your level and unlocks rewards; it is not currency and cannot be spent on boxes.

XP mode / Spark mode

The mode of a mini-game played without Stars: each round costs 1 Spark and pays XP instead of Stars. Thirteen of Gift Club's fourteen games have both a Stars mode and a Spark mode; Match-3 is XP-only.

Paid mode

A mini-game round staked in Stars or Gram, paying out in the currency it was staked in. This is the mode that RTP figures and the provably-fair scheme apply to.

Streak reward

A claim available every four hours that pays Sparks plus XP, growing for each consecutive day you keep the streak going. A missed day freezes the streak instead of resetting it; repairing it costs Stars, and a streak left unrepaired eventually starts over.

Sparks

The currency that Spark-mode rounds cost, at 1 Spark a round. Sparks come from the streak reward, and new players start with 10. Stars rounds never cost Sparks. One box and one scratch card are priced in Sparks; everything else costs Stars.

Referral revenue share

Gift Club's referral model: 30% of every top-up made by a player you invited, paid weekly for as long as they keep playing. It is a share of spending, not a one-off signup bounty.

3. Odds and fairness

The vocabulary you need to judge any gift game, including this one. Two of these — RTP and provably fair — are routinely used as if they meant the same thing. They do not: one is about how much a game returns, the other about whether a single result was tampered with. An app can have either without the other.

RTP (return to player)

The share of everything staked that a game pays back, averaged over a very large number of rounds. Ten Gift Club games run at a 95% target, and an active promotion can lift the effective return above it. The per-game figures are in the RTP index.

House edge

The complement of RTP — the share the operator keeps. A 95% RTP is a 5% house edge. It applies to every wager, so re-staking winnings exposes them again.

Volatility (variance)

How spread out a game's results are. Two games can share an RTP while one pays small and often and the other pays rarely and large; volatility, not RTP, is what a session actually feels like.

Gacha

A game mechanic where you pay for a randomised prize rather than a chosen one, named after Japanese capsule-toy machines. Box openings are gacha; the mini-games are not.

Cash-out ladder

A game shape where the multiplier climbs with each successful step and you choose when to stop. Stopping early banks a smaller win; one wrong step forfeits the round.

Provably fair

A commit-reveal scheme letting a player verify that a result was fixed before they played and not altered afterwards. It covers Gift Club's paid mini-games; box outcomes are outside it. Full walkthrough in how to verify a provably fair round.

Server seed

A secret random value the operator generates before a round and commits to by publishing its SHA-256 hash. It is revealed when you rotate your seeds, so you can check the commitment.

Client seed

A value you choose, mixed into the result alongside the server seed. Because you control it and can change it at any time, the operator cannot pre-compute results that suit them.

Nonce

A counter that increases by one per bet, so no two rounds on the same seed pair produce the same result. It resets to zero whenever either seed is rotated.

Commitment

The published hash of the server seed. Verifying a round starts by re-hashing the revealed seed and confirming it matches the hash you were shown before playing.

Related reading

• What Are Telegram Stars? — the beginner's version of the first entry above.
• Telegram Games RTP Index — the published figures behind the RTP entry.
• How to Verify a Provably Fair Round — seeds, nonces and commitments, at length.
• Gift Club in Telegram — the app these definitions describe.

Telegram gifts glossary FAQ

What is a Telegram gift?

A digital item one Telegram user sends another, bought with Stars. An ordinary gift is decorative; some can be upgraded into a collectible.

What is a collectible gift?

A Telegram gift that has been upgraded into a unique, tradable item with its own attributes and serial number. Once upgraded it can be transferred, sold, or exported to a TON wallet.

Can Telegram Stars be cashed out?

Not by ordinary users. Stars are not a cryptocurrency and cannot be cashed out to a bank account.

What is the difference between RTP and house edge?

RTP is the share of everything staked that a game pays back, averaged over a very large number of rounds. House edge is the complement, so a 95% RTP is a 5% house edge.

What does provably fair mean?

A commit-reveal scheme that lets a player verify a result was fixed before they played and not altered afterwards. It covers Gift Club's paid mini-games; box outcomes are outside it.