Tap, Tap, Payday: How Notcoin Handed Tokens to 35 Million Telegram Players
It was barely a game: you tapped a coin on your phone. But in May 2024 Notcoin turned those taps into one of the largest airdrops in crypto history. Who actually got paid, and why its own makers later called tap-to-earn 'probably dead'.
Most games in this section asked players to buy something before they could earn. Notcoin asked for almost nothing. You opened it inside Telegram, tapped a big coin on the screen, and watched a number go up. For months, its creators said openly that the points might be worth nothing.
Then, on 16 May 2024, the points became a real token, NOT, on Telegram's affiliated blockchain, TON. More than 80 billion tokens went to players, and the token debuted at a fully diluted value of about $1 billion. For a few weeks, Notcoin was the biggest money story in blockchain gaming, and the money went mainly to players, not founders.
A game that promised nothing
Notcoin came out of Open Builders, a team in the TON ecosystem, with Sasha Plotvinov among its best-known faces. In early 2024 it spread through Telegram groups at astonishing speed. By February, Decrypt was reporting 25 million players under the headline "We're promising nothing". By the token launch, the team said it had more than 35 million.
The design was deliberately simple. Tapping "mined" in-game Notcoins; inviting friends and joining channels earned more. There was no Axie-style team to buy and no NFT required to start, which is a big reason the audience grew so large.
The airdrop in numbers
When NOT launched, The Block reported:
- Total supply: about 102.7 billion NOT.
- 72.3 billion NOT went to "miners", the players who had tapped.
- About 8 billion more were redeemable by holders of Notcoin vouchers, NFTs that players could mint from their balances.
- Together that was about 78% of supply. The other 22% was kept for new users, traders and development.
The token listed on several large exchanges on the same day. At a debut valuation of roughly $1 billion for the whole supply, players' 78% share was worth, on paper, in the region of $780 million, spread across millions of wallets. Most players received small amounts, but early and heavy tappers, and those who had traded vouchers, received far more.
The rally and the drop
NOT kept climbing after launch. In early June 2024, it surged about 440% in a week to an all-time high. Telegram founder Pavel Durov also praised the project publicly, and NOT briefly approached the top 50 cryptocurrencies by market value. Players who sold into that rally did best.
Like almost every gaming token, it did not stay there. Copycat tap games flooded Telegram, including Hamster Kombat, and by the autumn of 2024 the Notcoin team itself was telling a conference crowd at TOKEN2049 that tap-to-earn was "probably dead".
Who made the money
Notcoin is unusual in this section because its biggest winners were ordinary players. The team kept a minority of the supply for development rather than taking the lion's share, and no founder has a published net worth from Forbes or Bloomberg. The exchanges that listed NOT, and TON itself, which gained millions of new wallets, were also clear winners.
WGC's take
Notcoin was closer to a marketing event than a game, and its makers said so. But it showed something the 2021 play-to-earn boom never did: a way to spread a token across tens of millions of people without making them buy in first. The catch is that nothing in the design gave players a reason to stay once the airdrop was paid. That is the problem every Telegram game since has tried to solve.
Token prices are highly volatile. Nothing in this article is investment advice.