Telegram Gifts explained: prices, collectibles, and channels
Telegram Gifts in plain terms: regular vs collectible, Stars prices, upgrades, the resale marketplace — and why channel owners should gift subscribers back.
TL;DR. Gifts are digital items bought with Stars: send one to a person or a channel and it sits on their profile. Some upgrade into fixed-supply collectibles traded on an official in-app marketplace — for Stars, no wallet. The underrated part for channel owners: your bot can send gifts to subscribers from the Stars it has earned — a built-in thank-you and retention tool.
Gifts launched in Telegram in October 2024 and went from “Stars greeting cards” to a market with hundreds of millions in turnover. Here is how they work — and what’s actually useful in them if you run a channel rather than trade JPEGs.
Two kinds of gifts
Regular — bought with Stars (the cheapest start around 15), sent to any user or channel, displayed on the recipient’s profile. Unlimited supply. The recipient can convert one back into Stars.
Collectible — what a regular gift becomes after an upgrade: a unique model, pattern, backdrop and a serial number, with a fixed supply per collection. Scarcity created a secondary market where rare pieces resell for many times their face value. Since February 2026 there’s also crafting — combining several collectibles into a rarer one.
Prices and where they trade
Regular gifts cost units or tens of Stars. Collectibles are a different universe: floors of the hyped collections have reached thousands of dollars, and all-time market turnover has passed several hundred million.
The important 2026 change: the official resale marketplace lives inside Telegram and runs on Stars — you can buy and sell collectibles without a crypto wallet. The blockchain remains an option for exporting to external marketplaces, not a requirement.
An honest caveat: the speculative wave is cooling — volumes and floors of top collections have been sliding through 2026. Buying gifts “as an investment” is a risk to weigh soberly. Sending them stays cheap — and that’s the use case that isn’t going anywhere.
Gifts and channels: both directions
A channel receives. Subscribers can send gifts to the channel itself — a donation everyone can see on the profile. The fuller the showcase, the stronger the social proof.
A channel gives. The less obvious direction and the more interesting one: a channel’s bot has its own Stars balance — that’s where paid-post and subscription revenue lands — and the bot can send gifts to subscribers from that balance. A closed loop: the audience brings Stars in, part of the Stars goes back to the audience as recognition.
Who to gift is up to you: a contest winner, the month’s top commenter, your longest-standing subscriber, a customer after a big purchase. In AdminHub it takes no code: open a subscriber’s card in the People section, tap ”🎁 Send a gift”, pick from the catalog — the gift goes out from your bot’s balance.
What’s native and what isn’t
Telegram natively covers manual gifting, profile showcases, and giveaways with Premium subscriptions or Stars as prizes. What it does not do natively: giveaways with gifts as the prize, or “gift for an action” — a purchase, a referral, activity. That’s bot-automation territory, and it’s where our tooling is headed — starting with one-tap gifting from the dashboard.
The currency underneath all of this — rates, withdrawal, limits — is covered in a separate guide: what are Telegram Stars.
What people usually ask
- What are Telegram Gifts?
- Digital items sent to a user or a channel for Stars; the gift shows up on the recipient's profile. Regular gifts start at ~15 Stars and are unlimited; some can be upgraded into collectibles with unique attributes and a fixed supply.
- Can you sell a Telegram gift?
- A collectible (upgraded) one — yes: Telegram runs an official resale marketplace where gifts are bought and sold for Stars, no crypto wallet needed. A regular gift can't be resold, but the recipient can convert it back into Stars.
- Can a channel receive gifts?
- Yes — gifts can be sent to channels and appear on the channel's profile. It works as a new kind of donation: support that everyone can see.
- Why would a channel owner send gifts?
- Because the channel's bot has its own Stars balance — the channel's earnings — and can send gifts to subscribers from it. Thank a top commenter, reward a contest winner, surprise a long-time subscriber. In AdminHub it's one button on the subscriber's card.
- Are Telegram Gifts crypto?
- No. Buying, gifting and reselling all run on Stars inside Telegram, no wallets involved. The blockchain only enters if you export a collectible to external NFT marketplaces — optional, not required.