‘Notcoin’ Is Giving $1 Million to Telegram Game’s Pre-Market Traders

Telegram-based game Notcoin has been responsible for this year’s biggest gaming token launch—and the price has only surged since then, more than tripling in value recently as The Open Network-based NOT token gains steam. Now the team has rewarded the earliest traders who made a bet on Notcoin’s future performance.

Back in March, before the NOT token launched and Notcoin was purely playing with in-game coins, developer Open Builders launched a novel “pre-market vouchers” model. Players who had mined at least 10 million in-game coins could swap them for a tradeable NFT that could be redeemed for the eventual on-chain token.

Given the hype around Notcoin and the fact that the Telegram clicker game had amassed tens of millions of players, traders anticipated a potentially sizable return on the tokens. And when the first vouchers hit the open market—available for some Notcoin players at first, but not all—the limited supply helped drive up the price… which eventually fell sharply.

For example, some of the initial vouchers that represented 10 million in-game coins—which would later be redeemable for 10,000 NOT tokens—sold for about $230 worth of Toncoin (TON) on the open market at first. In time, the price settled below $100 worth of TON.

All of this happened on a peer-to-peer market, and the whole point of pre-market trading was to let people speculate on the eventual price of Notcoin. Interestingly, that initial high price is roughly where the actual token price sits right now—10,000 NOT is worth about $240 as of writing.

But given the disparity at the time, and a sense that some early traders had overpaid for the vouchers amid limited liquidity before the feature was opened up to all players, the Notcoin team said in March that it had taken a snapshot of the early holders and that it would provide a “meaningful bonus” to those wallets in the future.

“The reason is simple: Once the queue is open for everyone, the amount of vouchers will increase dramatically, so we want to support those who bought [at a] higher price,” the team wrote in March.

On Tuesday, Open Builders made good on that promise, saying that it would drop a total of 40 million NOT—approximately $1 million worth—to the holders of the first 5,867 Notcoin vouchers purchased or held “before the pre-market was open for everyone.”

Each eligible user will receive 6,900 NOT, or about $170 worth, per voucher. That’s free crypto, particularly for any users who either held their vouchers or redeemed them and then held onto the NOT tokens, given their recent price jump. The tokens will be sent to eligible wallets today, according to the post.

Notcoin has seen a massive surge in price over the last couple weeks, now up 167% over the past seven days to a current price above $0.024. NOT now has a market cap of $2.5 billion, making it the 54th most valuable cryptocurrency on the market, per CoinGecko. It spiked above $0.028 on Sunday to set a new all-time high price.

Edited by Ryan Ozawa.