Notcoin is a Telegram-based game that has captured the attention of millions of players over the past few months. The game racked up 35 million total players, and hit a peak of six million daily active users earlier this year. That’s vastly larger than most crypto games.
The game, created by Open Builders, is based within the Telegram messaging app, and now has a token on The Open Network (TON) that launched in May. Its founder previously told Decrypt that the team sees it as a unique way to distribute tokens to community members in a fair manner—but now there are larger-scale ambitions ahead.
What could motivate 35 million players to tap a golden coin in a messaging app? Crypto rewards, of course! Here’s what you need to know about Notcoin and the recently launched token.
What is Notcoin?
Notcoin, simply put, is a social clicker game. Players who want to earn in-game coins can open up the Telegram app, tap the Notcoin bot, invite friends to the game, and dive in.
Once you’re in the game, a gold coin is displayed on your screen—and you tap the coin to earn an in-game currency called Notcoin. You’re given limited energy that depletes and then refills slowly over time, so you can’t click endlessly without barriers.
I wasn’t expecting to enjoy Notcoin. To be honest, I was pretty dismissive at first. You tap an image of a coin on your mobile device, earn an in-game currency for each tap, and are bound by an energy bar that depletes as you tap (and refills when idle). And in the end, you'll be entitled to an airdrop of an upcoming token based on your tapping abilities.
It sounded pretty dull. So imagine my surprise that three weeks after trying the game for the first time, I’m still opening it up every mornin...
As you earn more and more Notcoin, you climb up a global leaderboard that’s broken into different tiers—from Silver league to Diamond league. Players can earn extra tokens by completing quests that usually involve actions such as following a Twitter account or joining a Telegram community.
Players can also use “boosts” or power-ups in the game that increase their earning potential. There are two categories of free boosts that refresh daily, the “Full Energy” and “Turbo” boosts, as well as additional permanent boosts that players can buy with their Notcoin. Such perks let players increase how many coins they earn per tap and how much energy they can spend at once, plus there’s an Auto-Tap bot that keeps collecting coins while you’re away.
Players can use the Notcoin they’ve earned to purchase cosmetic upgrades to change the background of the game, or what the coin they’re tapping looks like.
Note that the game ended its "mining phase" on April 1, ahead of the May 16 token launch, and still has yet to open it up again. That functionality may return as Notcoin expands into more of a social gaming platform, but if and when remain unclear.
What is the NOT token?
After all that, you might still be wondering: Why did 35 million people tap a coin to earn an in-game currency? The Notcoin team announced an airdrop for a real token that was ultimately awarded to players in May, after being cagey about the possibility at first.
Notcoin popped onto crypto gamers’ radar at the start of the year, as millions of Telegram players flocked to the chat app’s curious coin-tapping distraction—and were apparently mining billions of Notcoin in the process.
But there was a curious catch: the coins weren’t real, at least not in the on-chain cryptocurrency sort of way. Now there are more than 25 million “Notcoiners” furiously tapping that same gleaming coin, competing in squads, and absorbing messages that are somewhat nihilistic but...
The token, called NOT, went live on The Open Network (TON)—the network that Telegram itself originally founded—on May 16, and players could claim an allocation of NOT based on the in-game coins they mined.
Major exchanges like Binance, OKX, and Bybit listed the token on day one, and Binance and OKX both ran staking rewards campaigns, collectively rewarding their customers with more than 4 billion NOT. Binance customers staked over $14 billion worth of crypto in an effort to secure rewards.
More than four months after the game launched via messaging app Telegram, Notcoin debuted its NOT token Thursday via The Open Network (TON)—and the massive airdrop yielded the largest gaming token launch of 2024 so far, along with over a billion dollars worth of trading volume so far.
The NOT token is currently trading at a price of approximately $0.0076, per data from CoinGecko, giving it a market cap of about $776 million with the entire supply of 102.7 billion tokens minted right from the sta...
Notcoin is the biggest crypto gaming token launch of 2024 so far, with a market cap that peaked near $1.5 billion on launch day—more than twice the peak of runner-up Pixels (PIXEL)—and has shot past $2 billion since at its peak price. NOT also saw more than $1 billion worth of trading volume within several hours on the first day of trading.
Notcoin, a simple clicker-style game within messaging app Telegram, has racked up over 25 million players since the start of 2024 and plans to convert the trillions of virtual coins mined so far into a real crypto token on The Open Network. Open Builders founder Sasha Plotvinov joins Decrypt's Andrew Hayward to explain the viral phenomenon.
Pre-market vouchers
Leading up to the airdrop, the Notcoin team launched an NFT voucher program. Any player with over 10 million Notcoin earned can convert their Notcoin (in 10 million increments) into NFT vouchers. The vouchers could be bought, sold, or traded before the actual launch of NOT, allowing players to speculate on the eventual price of the real token. Now that the token is live, players with NFT vouchers can cash them in to receive the specified amount of NOT.
Notcoin users were feeling generous ahead of Thursday’s NOT token launch, as over half a million players of the viral Telegram-based clicker game donated a share of their in-game coins to Telegram founder Pavel Durov. Now that haul is worth millions of dollars—and Durov says he’s holding for a potential 100x gain.
More than 552,000 players of Notcoin donated a share of their in-game coins to Durov back in February, part of an effort by the Notcoin team—called Open Builders—to thank the Telegram...
The future
Notcoin's gameplay is still on pause as of this writing, but it's expected to come back, albeit with some changes. The coin-tapping game will be revived, but since no new tokens will be minted, it will be funded by companies that want to gain exposure to the sizable audience that Notcoin built.
"They will just continue to click on a button and earn coins, with more complexity and less rewards than they had in the mining phase," Open Builders founder Sasha Plotvinov told Decrypt's GG ahead of the end of the mining phase.
Telegram-based crypto game Notcoin says it racked up nearly 9 trillion taps over the course of its mining phase, but with gameplay currently paused ahead of the incoming token launch on The Open Network—set for April 20—the tapping has stopped for now.
Notcoin plans to relaunch its game after the token launch and airdrop but with a new rewards model. That’s because Notcoin will not mint any additional tokens, as all pre-launch mining is complete. The in-game coins will be swapped for NOT crypto...
Notcoin had already been integrating with other projects and providing coins for engaging with their content, but under the new format, such projects will need to buy up NOT on the open market and pay it into a smart contract to activate such features. The game has already showed off some of how this works through earnings missions in late May and early June that offered passive NOT income for users.
Open Builders founder Sasha Plotvinov speaks with Decrypt's Sander Lutz at Token 2049 Dubai about how he envisions Notcoin's expansion and evolution after the token drop—into something akin to the "Netflix of social, viral games."
There are other potential additions and changes ahead. For example, Plotvinov said that the team plans to build "trading bot" functionality into Notcoin to let people buy and sell crypto tokens via Telegram. Open Builders aims to build a more visual interface than the text-based approach of some other trading bots.
The creators of Telegram-based game Notcoin currently have their hands full, with millions of users eagerly anticipating the game’s imminent NOT token launch on The Open Network (TON).
And yet, the game’s developers already have their sights set on even bigger things: Namely, transforming Notcoin from a viral, coin-tapping sensation into a comprehensive, scaled gaming ecosystem powered by a community of builders.
“We want it to become the Netflix of social, viral games,” Open Builders founder Sa...
Ultimately, Notcoin also aims to turn its app into a "Netflix for social, viral games," as Plotvinov told Decrypt's GG, letting developers deploy their own simple, social games and tap into the large ecosystem of players that Notcoin has attracted.
Users can also stake their NOT tokens within the game to unlock higher user account "levels," which will unlock additional features and potential staking rewards too—even from other affiliated projects. The "first campaigns, products, and offers" are set to launch this week, according to the Notcoin team, and "Gold and Platinum levels will have an access to allocations from other launches."
Viral Telegram game Notcoin has teased a “fresh start” amid a campaign that will see approximately $8 million worth of NOT tokens either burned or given out to the community.
The tap-to-earn game captured the attention of over 35 million players who furiously tapped their screens to collect digital tokens earlier this year. These coins were later converted to NOT tokens in the largest crypto gaming token launch of 2024 so far.
Notcoin’s success was largely tied to the looming possibility of an a...
In late June, Notcoin teased a "fresh start" nearing, and it appears to be come kind of collaboration with Lost Dogs Co., an existing TON NFT project that launched in early 2023. It's unclear whether this will be the next social game in Notcoin or some other giveaway or offering, but it certainly sounds substantial based on the early billing.
Notcoin led to this year’s biggest and buzziest gaming token launch so far, but the Telegram mini app is no one-off sensation.
Hamster Kombat has already surged to greater heights in terms of pre-token players, claiming more than 300 million users already ahead of its launch on The Open Network (TON), while other games on Telegram are gaining steam with the same kind of model.
Like Hamster Kombat, games like PixelTap and Yescoin are expanding upon the basic “clicker” or screen-tapping premise in...
Notably, Notcoin is now seen as the O.G. game in the Telegram world, laying the foundation for current and rising sensations like Hamster Kombat, Yescoin, Tapswap, Catizen, and many more games in the same vein.
Edited by Andrew Hayward
Editor's note: This story was originally published on March 27, 2024 and last updated on July 1.
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