Notcoin
Notcoin is the largest Web3 project with a native token $NOT, reaching about 40 million active users at the moment. At the same time, its team did not raise funds from investors and did not conduct token sales rounds. The project actively uses referral mechanics. 94 percent of Nottcoin users came there at the invitation of their friends.
The project’s strategy is to work with the community over the next 4-5 years to create enough efficiently working subsystems that add value to the ecosystem to make it fully autonomous and self-developing.
The project’s motto: «Do the right thing until it’s done».
The 1H 2024 Report shows Notcoin’s presence in different regions of the planet.
Chronicle
Initially, Notcoin is a clicker game in Telegram, where the main task of the user is to click on a coin on the smartphone screen, increasing their coin balance. The founder of the game is Alexander Plotvinov.
Later the game was called «coin mining», but what the project coins would represent remained a mystery for a long time, hence the world-famous Notcoin slogan — «Probably nothing». At the stage of mining coins Notcoin could earn anyone who wanted to, just by clicking on the screen.
Beta testing of the game began in October 2023. The game instantly spread among the TON community. The early testers helped the team find bugs and errors. Through this interaction, the Notcoin team improved their product and prepared for the official release. By January 1, all early balances were zeroed out.
Mining
Clicker was officially released on January 1, 2024 at 00:00. After just 1 month, it spread virally to 20M users, a record among crypto games.
Mining Mechanics
To start mining coins, all you had to do was launch @notcoin_bot
Each click = 1 Notcoin.
There were Boosters in the game, leveling up of which the user could increase:
- Energy limit — energy reserve
- Multitap — number of clicks at one click
- Recharging speed — energy recovery speed
- Auto Tap Bot — a bot that collected coins without direct participation of the user, active for no more than 12 hours of its absence.
There were also Rockets in the game that appeared suddenly and increased Multitap without wasting energy.
Extra Income
In the «Earn» section, affiliate tasks appeared, which could earn coins. The tasks were very simple, mostly subscriptions to channels, most often TON ecosystems and site visits. Thanks to the affiliate program, more than 200,000 new users came to Notcoin every day to click a coin.
Burning
- Notcoin were burned when leveling up Boosters, with each new level the user had to spend more and more coins.
- The guys from the team came up with additional mechanics of burning — the first Skins appeared in the game. Instead of a coin, which had become annoying for several months, you could buy a Skin of «Nuka-Cola» cap.
- Later, many other Skins appeared, which could be obtained for partner tasks, as well as simply purchased for the balance.
Easter Eggs
At some point, users noticed that at a particular frequency of clicks, letters appeared on the screen. Many tried to pick up words and phrases. People ran around the chat rooms looking for a clue. It turned out that commands had to be typed in morse code. The result was a black, beautiful skin. There were other Easter Eggs.
Resetting Balances
Another solution was to reset (zero out) inactive accounts. Users who had not logged into the game for more than a month were subjected to a gradual reduction of their balances, up to complete zeroing. Thus, the team decided to reduce the number of bots and leave only active users.
Vouchers
In March 2024, the team announced the launch of Pre-Market.
The game introduced a «Trade» button that could be used to turn your balance into an NFT voucher and start trading it on the Getgems marketplace on TON blockchain, for Toncoin cryptocurrency even before the $NOT coin was listed.
There were only 2 denominations — 10,000,000 and 100,000,000 still undenominated Notcoin coins. The vouchers had the same value as the balance in the game.
It was announced that when coins were listed on exchanges both could be exchanged for NOT. So it was up to the user to decide whether to sell NFT or wait for listing.
Liquidity for Exchanges
The team announced that 20% from the sale of all NFT vouchers would be put into liquidity for listing on exchanges. The amount of NFT sales on the marketplace eventually exceeded 4 million Toncoin, which means that about a million Toncoin was thus invested in the coin's liquidity.
Notcoin mining ended on April 1, 2024 at 12:00. The organizers announced the start of the next phase.
First results of the Experiment
The coins were distributed to 11.5M people as part of the game mechanics. On average, ~$250 per user, making a total of ~$2.7B. In the process, mining Notcoin brought over 20M new users to Telegram and TON blockchain. The project's community on Telegram exceeded 4M. Notcoin has become the #2 trend in the US according to Twitter.
«Notcoin is a big experiment, the mechanics of which are invented and added to as it develops», — Alexander Plotvinov.
Exchange Listing
Immediately after the completion of the mining stage, the native coin $NOT was listed.
Before the listing, the organizers denominated the coin by removing three zeros. Thus, 10,000,000 coins clicked in the game became equal to 10,000 $NOT.
Trading in $NOT/$USDT pairs opened on May 16 at 12:00 simultaneously on several major exchanges: Binance, OKX, Bybit, Kucoin, Gate, Bitget and others, as well as on decentralized exchanges STON.fi and DeDust. Additionally, Binance allowed users to farm NOT tokens through staking BNB or FDUSD, with a distribution of over 3 billion tokens (3% of the total supply). Meanwhile, OKX launched a "Jumpstart" campaign to distribute 1.28 billion tokens to users staking Toncoin.
The $NOT coin instantly became one of the TOP 10 cryptocurrencies in the world in terms of trading volume, and its market capitalization reached almost $700M on the first day of trading, and two weeks later it exceeded $2.5B.
In addition, since May 2024, $NOT has been embedded into @Wallet, making transactions with the coin available to hundreds of millions of people directly on the Telegram platform.
One of the game's mechanics during the mining period allowed the user to send a portion of the coins earned to Pavel Durov, the founder of Telegram. After listing $NOT, these collected funds were transferred to Pavel Durov's address.
«Half a million Notcoin users gifted me $6.8M worth of $NOT. I will hold these coins until they turn to $680M, at which point I will use them to buy more servers for Telegram», — said Pavel Durov.
Compensation to Early Holders
At the beginning of the voucher sale, people bought vouchers at a huge price due to limited supply (the technical capability allowed to buy vouchers in very limited quantities for the first time, and the demand for them on the marketplace was explosive).
Although it depended on the users' actions (the price was determined by the P2P marketplace), the organizers decided to support these people. As a result, on June 4, 40M $NOT (~$1M) was sent to those who bought or held the first 5867 vouchers before the pre-sale period opened: 6,600 $NOT (~$170) per voucher.
$NOT Yield Program
When listing a coin, the organizers offered users several options for action: for example, to withdraw coins to their account on the exchange in advance or to block them for 1 month for staking. At the same time, unstaked coins could be claimed (withdrawn from Notcoin Bot) by June 16. Anything that was not claimed was burned.
Staking Pools in the app
Notcoin developers thanked users for participating in staking and announced levels of participants, which depend on the amount of $NOT invested: Silver (1 — 25,000), Gold (25,000 — 125,000) and Platinum (over 125,000). Users are assigned different account levels based on their activity in the previous phase of the project: Users can participate in the liquidity pools that periodically become available, complete tasks and receive $NOT. The higher the level, the greater the selection of tasks and the more $NOT is awarded for their fulfillment. Upgrade of levels is possible.
How to get a level in Notcoin?
- In Notcoin Bot user can see how much $NOT or Telegram Stars he will need to buy the desired level. The maximum level is Platinum. The most favorable rate is 12 months.
- You can exchange $NOT for $TON, for example, on STON.fi or via Tonkeeper.
- Calculate the required amount of $TON by entering the number of Telegram Stars required to buy the level in the «Choose quantity of Telegram Stars» field.
- Exchange $TON for Stars on Fragment, not forgetting to specify your username in the «Choose recipient» field. This is the most profitable way to buy Telegram Stars.
- Buy a level in Notcoin Bot by selecting Telegram Stars as a payment method.
Notcoin Explore
On July 12, Notcoin announced the completion of the beta version of the app and the official launch of Notcoin Explore, a space for users to actively discover new Web3 projects and receive bonuses from projects as well as $NOT.
The onboarding process is simple:
- User explores new projects and becomes part of their community
- Using the Notcoin app, the user for their actions receives rewards from the project
The higher the level in the app — the more opportunities. The more the user participates in projects, the more benefits he gets. Now in Notcoin everyone can get access to launch new projects with rewards and new games.
Gold level increases the base reward rate by x1000 and Platinum level increases the base reward rate by x5000.
Referral System
For inviting friends, the platform pays 15% of their purchases per $NOT level.
Whales who have more than 300 friends at the mining stage will get 25% and a new role.
Thus, Notcoin has launched an automated and smooth process to quickly introduce projects to the platform and attract an active audience.
Projects and Partnerships
- In May it was announced that Catizen, a popular game in TON ecosystem, could be played with Notcoin. Thanks to the integration of $NOT payments, the game project already earned 50M Notcoin in the first three days.
- In July, it became known that Notcoin and Helical.io were collaborating to help developers «create better games in Telegram».
- $BUILD — a token of TON community application that supports the development of open source tools for millions of Telegram users.
- Lost Dogs — a large-scale project created to unite the Telegram community through an interactive game.
- Not Pixel — a pixel battle implemented inside Telegram on a 1000×1000 pixel digital canvas where each player can place pixels and earn the in-game currency $PX.
- Earn Early — exclusive offers from promising early stage projects for early adopters, contributors and active users.
- Sticker Store — a collection of stickers from popular projects that can be purchased for the internal currency Telegram Stars.
«Hold to Earn» Yield program
A new profitability program, «Hold to Earn», has been in operation since the end of 2024. The idea behind this program is simple: the more tokens a user holds in their wallet, the more promotional tokens they earn. Now, everyone can earn rewards every hour by connecting their wallet and holding their tokens on it. A token holder can join multiple reward pools. For example, having $NOT and $PX in his wallet, one can join two pools at the same time.
The user ranks the members based on their token balance. To earn more, users increase their rankings by holding more tokens.
Promotional projects change all the time:
- For example, in December 2024, 1.8M participants joined the $BUILD pool within a few days. The total value of participating assets exceeded $160M, making @earn the most popular lunch pool in the world.
- Not Pixel, total reward pool: $22,500,000 $PX (not including rewards paid through the referral program). Program period: January 10-14, 2025.
- Lost Dogs, total reward pool: $243,000 $WOOF. Program period of validity: from January 15, 2025.
Contests
NOT ART
To increase community engagement, Notcoin announced the launch of a creative contest NOT ART in June. Everyone could:
- Create their own artwork
- Post it on social media with the #notcoin hashtag
- Send an application
There were no strict rules for the works — the participants were given full freedom of expression.
Over 2000 applications for participation were submitted during the month. The 42 best were selected by the organizers and allowed to vote, in which the rest of the winners participated in the form of DAO. In the end, the awards among the 42 best entries were distributed according to levels. Total prize pool exceeds $100,000 in $NOT. Winners' works are available on the Contest website.
Coubs Contest
In July, an extraordinary new creative contest was announced, with the winners sharing the $50,000 prize pool in $NOT. The contest attracted an incredible 100,000 applications. Among the best entries, the organizers selected the top 50, whose authors received $1,000 in $NOT each.
NOT Game
Contest for developers who love Web 3 games. To participate, a game MVP or concept (or just a clear idea) was required. Participants were encouraged to focus on social interactions and mechanics, challenging the usual vision of games. Winners shared a generous prize pool of $250,000 in $NOT. The best projects also gained access to Notcoin and Helika Accelerator. Some games can be launched on Notcoin.
NOT Stickers
Contest for those who are ready to create stickers for all Telegram users. Requirements: a ready set of static or animated stickers (10-15 stickers) in any style, but preferably they should be centered around a character. The deadline for the contest is February 5, 2025. Prize Pool: ~$12,000 in $NOT.
NOT Research
A contest for researchers, content creators and truth seekers who are invited to explore the Notcoin project and share their findings in a convenient way. Contest Categories:
- Verbal expression: research, texts, essays
- Visuals: videos, infographics, graph analysis.
The deadline for the contest is March 4, 2025. Prize pool: 15,000,000 $NOT. Top authors will join the research community.
The «NotOriginals» Merch Collection
At the end of 2024, a native collection of Notcoin-branded merch with the slogan «Probably nothing» and the ability to pay for orders in $NOT, $TON and $USDT appeared on Telegram [1]. Now everyone can buy a T-shirt, hoodie or cap in Notcoin branding.