Notcoin (NOT) is a TON blockchain token that started as a Telegram mini app where players tapped a gold coin on screen to mine in-game points. The app opened on 1 January 2024, gathered more than 35 million players in four and a half months, and converted those points into a tradeable token on 16 May 2024. Over 80 billion NOT went out in that distribution, making it one of the widest airdrops crypto has ever run by number of recipients.
Two years on, NOT trades near $0.00050 for a market capitalization of about $50 million as of September 2026, according to CoinGecko. The token sits 98% below the peak it printed three weeks after launch. What survived the collapse is more interesting than the price: a Telegram-native advertising machine that pays users in NOT to try other crypto projects.
The Tapping Game That Ate Telegram
Notcoin was built by Open Builders, a TON-focused incubation team led by Sasha Plotvinov. The product was deliberately thin. You opened a Telegram chat, tapped a coin, and a counter went up. There was no wallet to install, no seed phrase to write down, no gas to pay. That absence of friction was the entire design thesis, and it worked at a scale nobody in crypto user acquisition had matched.
The mining phase ran for three months and closed on 1 April 2024. In March the team opened pre-market trading through an unusual mechanism: players could mint an NFT voucher representing their accumulated points and sell it on TON marketplaces before the token existed. Close to 800,000 vouchers were minted, they traded around a $26 floor for roughly $26 million in total volume, and the collection became the fourth-largest on TON by value with more holders than any other TON collection, The Block reported at launch.
When the token generation event arrived on 16 May 2024, in-game points converted to NOT at 1,000 to 1, and so did the vouchers. Anyone with a connected TON wallet could claim.
How the Supply Was Handed Out
The distribution was unusually skewed toward users. There was no private sale round, no venture allocation with a four-year cliff, and no team wallet holding a fifth of the float.
| Bucket | Tokens | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Miners (in-game points) | 72,265,851,714 | 70.4% |
| NFT voucher holders | 7,953,370,000 | 7.7% |
| New users, traders, development | ~22,500,000,000 | 21.9% |
| Total supply at TGE | 102,719,221,714 | 100% |
Miners and voucher holders together took 78% of the supply on day one. The remaining 22% was set aside for onboarding new users, exchange liquidity and future development. Because so much reached circulation immediately, NOT has almost no unlock overhang: circulating supply is 99.43 billion against a total of 102.45 billion, so market capitalization and fully diluted valuation sit within 3% of each other.
That structure explains both the launch spike and the collapse that followed. A crypto airdrop delivered to 35 million people who paid nothing for their tokens produces enormous first-week sell pressure, and NOT absorbed all of it inside a month.
What NOT Actually Does
The tapping stopped in 2024. The token's ongoing role is as the settlement currency for Notcoin's attention marketplace, and it works through three connected pieces.
Explore campaigns
Projects on TON and beyond pay to run campaigns inside the Notcoin app. Users complete tasks (join a channel, try a mini app, hold a token) and get paid from a NOT reward pool the project funds. More than 200 projects have run through Explore, with roughly 22.5 million users participating. The projects buy NOT to fill those pools, which is the closest thing the token has to structural demand.
Staking tiers
Reward size depends on a user's level, and level depends on how much NOT they have staked at the end of each month. The ladder runs from entry tiers up to Platinum, and the multiplier between the bottom and the top is severe: the team claimed 300%-plus annualized returns for Platinum holders when Decrypt covered the launch of earning missions in May 2024. This is staking in the loyalty-tier sense rather than the validator sense, since NOT secures nothing.
Spin-off games
Not Pixel, launched in late 2024, gave the community a shared canvas where placing pixels mined a separate token, PX. The spin-offs keep the brand in front of Telegram users between campaigns and feed players back into the main app.
Why the TON Connection Matters
NOT is a jetton, the TON equivalent of an ERC-20, and its fortunes are tied to Telegram's blockchain strategy rather than to any independent network. That link tightened in 2025, when TON became the exclusive blockchain for Telegram mini apps and competing chains had to migrate off the platform by 21 February.
The chain itself changed names in 2026. Following an 81.22% community vote, the native coin Toncoin was renamed Gram on 15 June 2026, reverting to the label Telegram used in its 2018 white paper. LeveX covered the TON to Gram rebrand at the time. Nothing about NOT changed, since the rebrand touched only the network's own coin, though it is a useful signal of how directly Telegram now steers the ecosystem NOT depends on.
Where NOT Stands in September 2026
The market data is blunt. NOT peaked at $0.02836 on 2 June 2024 and printed a fresh all-time low of $0.0003206 on 29 July 2026. It ranks around #448 by market capitalization, turns over $36 million a day across 55 exchanges, and has recovered about 21% in the week to early September after a 50% gain over the prior month.
Those recovery percentages matter less than the base they start from. A token down 98% needs a 50-fold move to revisit its high, and NOT's daily turnover of $36 million against a $50 million capitalization tells you the float changes hands constantly. This is an actively traded asset with thin conviction behind it, which is exactly the profile that produces the 20% weekly swings visible in its chart.
For comparison, Hamster Kombat, the tap-to-earn game that followed Notcoin with a claimed 300 million players, now carries a market capitalization near $11 million. Notcoin attracted a tenth of the users and holds four times the value, which says something about which brand survived the category's decline.
Risks Worth Pricing In
Attention is the product, and attention is the risk. Notcoin has no protocol revenue, no fee switch and no burn. Its demand depends on projects continuing to buy NOT for campaign pools, which depends in turn on TON project funding staying healthy.
The category history is not encouraging. Play-to-earn economies have repeatedly proven that reward-driven users leave when rewards shrink, a pattern examined in the analysis of whether Axie Infinity is dead. Notcoin faces the same gravity with a shorter runway, since it never had an in-game economy to fall back on.
Liquidity is the other practical issue. Depth on the major NOT pairs runs in the tens of thousands of dollars at 2% from mid, so size moves price. Traders should also treat NOT as a high-beta expression of Telegram sentiment: it moves with TON ecosystem news far more than with anything Notcoin itself ships.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Notcoin used for?
NOT is the reward and staking currency of the Notcoin app on TON. Projects fund campaign pools in NOT to attract Telegram users, and users stake NOT to raise their tier and claim a larger share of those pools. It carries no governance rights and secures no network.
Is Notcoin still active in 2026?
Yes. The tapping game ended in April 2024, but the app continues to run Explore campaigns for TON ecosystem projects, and NOT trades roughly $36 million a day across 55 exchanges as of September 2026. Activity has narrowed from the 2024 peak while the product and token remain live.
How many Notcoin tokens are there?
Total supply is about 102.45 billion NOT and roughly 99.43 billion is already circulating, so market capitalization and fully diluted valuation are nearly identical. At the token generation event the total was 102,719,221,714, with 78% distributed to players and NFT voucher holders.
Who created Notcoin?
Notcoin was built by Open Builders, a TON ecosystem incubation team led by Sasha Plotvinov. Open Builders also funds and onboards other TON projects, several of which run user campaigns through the Notcoin app.
Why did Notcoin crash after its airdrop?
NOT fell because 35 million recipients received tokens at zero cost and a large share sold immediately. The token reached $0.02836 on 2 June 2024, three weeks after launch, then declined steadily as airdrop supply met limited organic demand. Similar drawdowns hit every major tap-to-earn token from the same cycle.
Is Notcoin a memecoin?
NOT is classified as both a gaming token and a memecoin by major data providers, and it behaves like the latter. Its price responds to Telegram and TON narrative cycles rather than to revenue or usage metrics, which is the defining trait of the category.
What Notcoin Proved and What It Still Has to Prove
Notcoin settled an argument about crypto onboarding. Tens of millions of people will hold a wallet and claim a token if the process hides inside an app they already use, and no amount of documentation or referral bonus achieves the same thing. That lesson now shapes how every Telegram-native project designs its funnel.
The unresolved question is whether an attention marketplace can hold value once the novelty fades. NOT trades near its all-time low with a small, fully circulating supply and a working product that generates real campaign demand, and the size of that demand is what the next year decides. Traders taking a position should size it as the high-beta Telegram proxy it is.
Take a position either way: hold NOT on the spot market or trade the swings with NOT perpetual futures on LeveX. More token breakdowns are waiting in Crypto in a Minute.