Notcoin: What Was it and What is it Now?

Notcoin was minted on the TON blockchain and listed on Binance, OKX, Bybit, Bitfinex, Gate.io and other exchanges and became available in Telegram's native Wallet on May 16. The NOT launch was not completely smooth but generally successful.

The Wallet crashed straight away, apparently unable to handle the number of deals, and wasn't operational for at least 7 hours. Our observer reported that Notcoins deposited in advance were not reflected on the balance as of May 16 and appeared only the next day. Binance removed the NOT/BTC trading pair to "provide better trading experience" while other pairs remained operational. Binance declined some deposits of Notcoin after the exchange compliance check, but reportedly, the issue was rapidly fixed.

The price after listing first reached ATH of $0.014, according to CoinMarketCap (or $0.022 as per Coingecko data), but then went down and fluctuated around $0.007 throughout the day, decreasing to as low as $0.006. The price is significantly lower than the pre-market trading price of $0.01. This sharp decline most likely indicates a massive sell-off, a typical pattern for many cryptocurrencies airdrops. Still, the price is higher than nothing and has seemed to consolidate at its current level of around $0.007. The Notcoin is ranked 8th by daily volume out of almost 10,000 cryptocurrencies listed on CoinMarketCap. Its trading volume surpassed $1 billion within the first six hours of trading, with a market cap of about $755 million.

Sasha Plotvinov, Notcoin's co-founder, shared that the launch was "intense," and the team was trying to ensure that everything worked and handle all the challenges without analyzing the results yet. He also said that the team was unprepared for such rapid development and growth and had to learn quickly when the project gained momentum.

Notcoin, developed by The Open Network community, was first announced last November. The 'nothing or everything' meme-coin, mined via a viral click-to-earn Telegram mini-app game, rapidly entered all trends and accumulated a huge and loyal user base. The developers were brutally honest and promised nothing, thus apparently only attracting more users. Some tried to replicate its success by creating Yescoin and other Telegram games.

The hype around the coin pushed the price of the TON ecosystem native token on the eve of listing. Since the announcement that the top crypto exchanges are going to integrate NOT, TON's price has fluctuated around $7, almost reaching its ATH of $7.7 on May 13. After the Notcoin listing, the TON price dropped slightly, reaching as low as $6.4 half an hour after the trading started. We surmise that some users expected Notcoin to perform some market miracle, but its current price is approximately the same as indicated at the pre-market. It seems this frustration slightly pushed Toncoin back.

Even though Notcoin didn't immediately outperform its less groundless competitors, we can safely say that the project team created something from nothing. This is the first project on The Open Network of that scale, and its simple gamified techniques blended in Telegram perfectly align with the community efforts to onboard millions of people, as one of the TON team members cleverly said, not in Web3 yet but in Web2.5.