How Telegram Bot Notcoin Attracted 20 Million Users in Less Than a Month
The audience of the Telegram application Notcoin, whose users play virtual coin mining by tapping on the smartphone screen, has grown 41 times since its public launch on January 1, from 0.5 million to 20.7 million players. This has made Notcoin the fastest-growing game in billionaire Pavel Durov’s Telegram ecosystem. Analysts attribute such growth dynamics to the participation of Telegram channels related to Durov, crypto exchanges like Binance, OKX, and other crypto projects. By January 29, the total farming volume reached nearly 13 trillion Notcoin. However, the service’s daily audience decreased by about one-third compared to its peak value last week. Analysts warn that if developers do not list the token on an exchange or find another practical use soon, the active Notcoin audience will decrease rapidly.
After the hype
During the New Year holidays, bored Telegram users found a new simple pastime: connecting to the Notcoin bot, tapping on the coin in the center, and increasing their balance in the game. One tap on the screen equals one coin. Earnings can be increased by completing tasks, such as subscribing to specific channels or inviting friends.
Literally within a few days after the launch of Notcoin, which suddenly became the fastest-growing game on Telegram, millions of users joined. It seems that many of them are hoping that a real cryptocurrency will be behind the virtual coin.
However, the daily audience of Notcoin has already noticeably decreased, according to their own statistics. On January 26, 3.5 million users played Notcoin. This is 30% less than the peak daily audience of 5 million users recorded by Alexander Plotvinov, the founder and CEO of Open Builders, the company that developed Notcoin, on January 9 (Plotvinov published this data on his account on social network X, which is blocked in Russia).
The number of users playing Notcoin online has also decreased. At 11:52 Moscow time on January 26, 83,051 accounts were playing Notcoin at the same time, while the peak figure in mid-January was at 180,000 players, Open Builders co-founder Sergey Chikirev told Forbes. “Now the level of noise around the game has died down, so sooner or later we will reach a plateau. But we want to invigorate players with new stories and mechanics very soon,” he said, answering questions about the reasons for the audience decline and a possible response to this trend.
Outgrow ChatGPT
Not Coin is one of the projects of Open Builders, which positions itself as an international development team. Another of its projects, Tonstarter, attracted $1.5 million in investment in the seed round in the spring of 2023.
“The investments affected our other projects, Notcoin was made in our free time. During the beta, when we felt the potential, we put everything aside and decided to make the game a full-fledged project for the majority of the team,” Sergey Chikirev explained to Forbes.
The Notcoin presentation took place on November 11, 2023, at The Gateway conference in Dubai. The event was attended by developers of applications for billionaire Pavel Durov’s Telegram messenger. The organizer was the TON Foundation, a non-profit organization developing the Web3 The Open Network (TON) ecosystem within Telegram with projects and services based on blockchain and cryptocurrency.
The penetration of cryptocurrency into Web3 is low, Alexander Plotvinov said in his presentation. He concluded that growth is hampered by “low motivation” among users who do not need cryptocurrency every day, and the complexity of the technology. Plotvinov proposed overcoming barriers in a game form. At the same time, his expectations seemed to be very modest. Attracting 100 million users, which the American service ChatGPT gained in two months, will take Web3 developers 15 years, predicted Plotvinov.
On the eve of Notcoin’s release from beta, the developers made several announcements of the upcoming launch in their channels. “We made a countdown to the launch, which coincided with the New Year’s time in your time zone,” Sergey Chikirev told Forbes. By this time, Notcoin, according to him, had attracted 0.5 million users.
The launch of Notcoin in Telegram took place on January 1, and the next day the official community of the game announced 1 million users. Notcoin reached this figure faster than ChatGPT, according to an article published on the TON ecosystem blog. ChatGPT surpassed the 1 million user mark five days after its launch in November 2022.
The TON blog also said that Notcoin has outpaced the GameFi projects Stepn and Axie Infinity, which were previously considered the most anticipated and popular, in terms of dynamics. Notcoin achieved this result “without a single dollar spent on advertising,” but only through the involvement and interaction with Telegram users, the publication notes. Chikirev confirms this. According to him, Open Builders did not and do not have plans to invest in Notcoin marketing. A week after the launch, Notcoin’s audience exceeded 4 million users, making it the fastest-growing Web3 game, the TON Foundation reported on January 9. On January 26, the total number of Notcoin players was 19.8 million. On Saturday night, January 27, the Notcoin Telegram channel reported 20 million users, by the morning of January 29, their number was 20.7 million.
But, as is the case with most blockchain games, it is difficult to verify how many participants are real players and how many are bots, notes the publication Decrypt.
“There were expectations that it would be relatively popular, but we did not expect it to be like this. It is nice that people are not just playing, but many have started to get acquainted with the TON ecosystem,” Chikirev comments on the results, linking them to the fact that “Notcoin is simple and fun.” According to him, during the development of the game’s design, virality techniques were added to it, but they were not emphasized too much. “In addition, because we do not directly talk about the next steps, players build their theories about the continuation, and this is always exciting. “By the way, we listen to them,” says Chikirev.
Answering the question whether it is correct to compare the dynamics of ChatGPT and Notcoin, he says that it is possible, “if you want to compete in size and success — we do not have such a goal.” “Notcoin and ChatGPT are products of completely different goals and segments,” he added.
Will Notcoin become a means of payment for which you can buy real goods? “We see no reason not to do this,” Chikirev answers.
First money
Due to the activity of Notcoin users, who can earn more coins in the game by joining “squads” — for example, Binance English, associated with the Binance crypto exchange, or Du Rove’s Channel (a Telegram channel that publishes official messages from the Telegram messenger), the game developers compensated for part of the costs. Du Rove’s Channel is the most popular squad, Chikirev notes.
“We have a squad boost mechanic, which allows you to place a squad on a special page. The placement is carried out according to the auction system: whoever gives more, goes up,” Chikirev said.
The funds from the paid promotion of the squad were enough to pay for the server infrastructure for several months, he assured. “It turned out nice, because those who promoted the squads got new players and, perhaps, even subscribers, and we continued to support the game with peace of mind,” Chikirev said.
There are games in Telegram with revenues of hundreds of thousands of dollars per month, Inal Kardanov, head of the gaming department at the TON Foundation, told Forbes. According to him, this is a “not bad” result for games built into the messenger.
“There are not many such projects yet, and they have emerged in the last couple of months. The penetration of games among Telegram users in general is also growing. And there are a large number of developers who port their games from other social networks — Facebook (owned by Meta, which is recognized as extremist in Russia and banned), WeChat, VK,” Kardanov notes. The Notcoin example, he says, is “very important — it shows how to attract people on social mechanics and how to monetize it.”