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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.