Telegram CEO Pavel Durov appears to endorse Notcoin following launch on TON blockchain

Telegram CEO Pavel Durov appeared to endorse the web3 game Notcoin on Friday, which launched its NOT token on The Open Network (TON) blockchain yesterday.

“Notcoin, a Mini App on Telegram, reached 35 million active users in just a few months,” Durov wrote to more than 2.5 million subscribers in his Telegram channel. “This amazing success story shows how powerful the Telegram/TON ecosystems are for app developers.”

After minting its cryptocurrency on the TON blockchain on Thursday, Notcoin airdropped more than 80 billion NOT tokens to participants as it opened for trading on various crypto exchanges.

Notcoin players "mined" the in-game currency simply by tapping a Notcoin icon on their phone, with the amount accrued now converted into the NOT token at a 1000:1 ratio.

Prior to Thursday's token generation event, pre-market trading of Notcoin was launched via an NFT trading system in March — with nearly 800,000 NFT vouchers minted now also convertible into NOT tokens at the same ratio via the Notcoin app.

“All of a sudden, Notcoin users who just played this game for fun could convert their in-game currency into real money,” Durov added.

Overall, 72,265,851,714 tokens have been distributed to miners, and 7,953,370,000 tokens are now redeemable by NFT voucher holders. 

The total supply of NOT tokens is 102.7 billion, with 78% allocated to "miners" and NFT voucher holders and the remaining 22% reserved for new users, traders and future development, according to the Notcoin team.

Notcoin exceeds $700 million fully diluted valuation

The 80,219,221,714 NOT tokens distributed yesterday represent a market capitalization of $545 million for Notcoin, with a fully diluted valuation of around $711 million, according to CoinGecko data . The price of Notcoin is currently trading at $0.0068.

At more than $1 billion in daily trading volume, Notcoin is also among the top ten cryptocurrencies by that metric over the past 24 hours, with around 678,000 on-chain wallets now holding NOT tokens, according to Tonviewer.

“Notcoin instantly became a top-10 cryptocurrency in the world by trading volume, and reached almost $700 million in market capitalization,” Durov said. “Imagine — hundreds of millions of dollars in value were created for Telegram users in this Mini App out of nowhere in a matter of months. We are now seeing a large wave of new Mini Apps being built on Telegram and TON.”

Notcoin monetized the Mini App by attracting web3 organizations to advertise themselves via the game, with players rewarded for participating in tasks designed to drive engagement to those projects.

Going forward, Notcoin’s team plans to continue rewarding users for exploring the crypto ecosystem using NOT tokens, with a trading bot also set to be introduced, enabling users to trade other TON-based tokens.

Telegram began exploring blockchain in 2018, developing the Telegram Open Network, as it was then known. It raised $1.7 billion in a private sale of Toncoin tokens the same year, but Telegram abandoned the project following SEC investigations. In 2022, open-source developers saved and rebranded it as The Open Network with a functional mainnet.

In 2023, Durov confirmed that he owned some Toncoin, adding in an interview last month that he's held a few hundred million dollars in his “bank account or in bitcoin” for 10 years.