The cryptocurrency game in the messenger attracted tens of millions of users, and then its token was released on crypto exchanges. Pavel Durov said he expects it to grow a hundredfold
On Thursday, May 16, major crypto exchanges, including Binance, OKX and Bybit, listed the NOT token of the Notcoin game. The game exists as an application inside the Telegram messenger and since its launch in January, it has attracted more than 35 million players who have converted game coins into tokens.
At the start of trading, the token price reached $0.37, but a few minutes later it was fixed at $0.01. As of May 17, 20:00 Moscow time, NOT is trading at $0.007 paired with the USDT stablecoin on the Binance exchange with a capitalization of more than $700 million.
The Notcoin game gained viral popularity on Telegram, its creators built successful marketing, and the referral system and support from influencers, and then the support of the Telegram team, helped it quickly gain millions of players who “mine” coins, waiting for their listing on crypto exchanges in the future.
The team initially planned to go public in April, but since NOT became the first token on The Open Network (TON) blockchain to be listed by crypto exchanges, they needed more time to prepare the infrastructure. This caused problems at the time of listing - for some users, tokens arrived at Bybit and Binance with delays of several hours. The internal crypto wallet of the Telegram messenger, which now also supports the Notcoin token, periodically froze due to overload.
The day after the listing, Pavel Durov wrote two posts in his Telegram channel, in which he emphasized the success of Notcoin, noting that on the day of listing on exchanges, the NOT coin entered the top 10 cryptocurrencies in terms of trading volumes, and its capitalization reached $700 million. In the game there was an opportunity to donate part of the coins to Durov. On May 17, the Notcoin developers, on behalf of the players, sent him $6.8 million in NOT tokens. He, in turn, said that he intends to hold them “until this $6.8 million turns into $680 million,” in order to then buy more servers for Telegram with these funds.
Cryptocurrencies are coming to Telegram
According to Durov, the success of Notcoin showed how attractive the Telegram and TON ecosystems are becoming for blockchain developers. He emphasized that Telegram can give their applications viral distribution through social relationships within the messenger.
A month before the listing of the game token, the TON ecosystem’s own cryptocurrency, Toncoin, became one of the top ten largest crypto assets by capitalization. The price of the coin has increased several times since the beginning of the year. The growth of its rate greatly accelerated after the release of Pavel Durov’s interview with the Financial Times, in which he said that the messenger received a preliminary valuation of $30 billion before a possible IPO.
The Telegram Open Network (TON) blockchain was launched by Pavel Durov and his brother Nikolai back in 2018, but two years later they were forced to abandon the project due to litigation with the US SEC. In 2019, the SEC sued Telegram for raising $1.7 billion in an initial coin offering (ICO) using the Gram token, which the regulator called an unregistered security.
Durov then made a deal with the SEC, returned unused investor funds and paid a fine of $18.5 million. The TON network was supported by members of the TON Foundation community, they continued its development.
Around the same moment, activity within the TON ecosystem began to increase exponentially. More and more applications and new tokens began to appear on the network, and the TON Foundation developer community announced a cryptocurrency grant program for the creators of the most popular of them.
In 2024, the volume of user funds (total value locked, TVL) within the TON network increased approximately 10 times. From April to May, the network's TVL grew nearly 50% and at its peak was $620 million, according to Defillama. To understand the scale: the TVL of the Ethereum network, as of May 17, is $54.4 billion, and that of Solana is $4.6 billion. TON is inferior to other networks, but is already in the top 30 by this indicator.
The increase in user capital in TON coincided with the deployment of the USDT stablecoin from Tether in this network. Since its launch on April 19, 330 million USDT has already been issued on the TON network, according to the official Tether website. The capitalization of USDT in all existing networks exceeds $110 billion. The launch of a stablecoin in TON was announced during a speech at the TOKEN2049 crypto conference in Dubai personally by Durov, the head of Tether Paolo Ardoino and the founder of TON Andrey Rogozov, a native of the VKontakte team, whom Durov calls his best friend.