Notcoin Founder Sasha Plotvinov: "The Key to Mass Adoption of Web3 Is Eliminating All Entry Barriers"

The "Tap to earn" type of play-to-earn games is undoubtedly one of the hot trends in the crypto market this year, successfully driving up the popularity of Telegram and the TON blockchain network.

Author: Weilin, PANews

The "tap to earn" type of play-to-earn games is undoubtedly one of the hot trends in the crypto market this year, successfully driving up the popularity of Telegram and the TON blockchain network. For example, Hamster Kombat claimed to have attracted over 300 million players before its airdrop in September. Tracing back to the source of this craze, the tap to earn game Notcoin, which launched on January 1 of this year, is undoubtedly the pioneer of tap to earn games on Telegram. Its token NOT, launched in May, had a market cap that once approached $3 billion in June.

On November 1, PANews interviewed Notcoin's founder Sasha Plotvinov during the TON ecosystem conference The Gateway in Dubai, discussing Notcoin's founding concept, token price fluctuations, the current state of the TON ecosystem, and how Notcoin maintains sustainable growth in a competitive market.

Sasha stated that simply copying others' gameplay is actually very difficult to succeed. Notcoin now also plays the role of a game publisher. He believes that by focusing on the community, Notcoin has enough depth to become a culture, effectively becoming a "cult." The key to achieving mass adoption of Web3 is first to eliminate all entry barriers, secondly to have a viral mechanism, and finally, to maintain a genuine and personalized product experience.

The Challenge for Product Managers: Unexpected Crash on Notcoin's Second Day

Sasha's career began as a product manager, where he learned many valuable lessons. He mentioned that the biggest challenge he faced early on as a product manager was that not everything one could think of would work as expected after launch. Many assumptions simply do not hold. And that’s okay; this "uncertainty" is an inevitable part of the development process.

He recalled that on January 2, the day after Notcoin's launch, the app crashed almost all day due to overwhelming demand. The team worked from 8 AM to 11 PM trying to resolve the issue but was unsuccessful. The next day, the app still could not function properly. "We were thinking, 'What should we do?' But we also learned a lot. So, we can say we did anticipate this goal, but we did not expect it to happen in this way," Sasha said. "To be honest, we had no experience with high-traffic applications before Notcoin, so we had to learn and adapt ourselves in the face of everything collapsing."

Tracing back to Notcoin's history, it was first launched for closed testing on Telegram in November 2023. Initially, the game was marketed as a meme coin with no clear purpose, merely to become a temporary viral phenomenon. At that time, Notcoin attracted over 650,000 users within a few weeks. After its official launch on January 1, over 5 million players joined in just the first week.

In the first quarter of this year, Notcoin drove the popularity of Telegram and TON, which now has hundreds of millions of monthly active users, while TON currently has millions of users. In fact, when founding Notcoin, Sasha and his team spent a long time thinking about how to establish a connection and how to guide some users to another platform.

They tried many different approaches, but at some point, they realized that they just needed to remove all entry barriers. For Telegram users, entering Web3 does not need to start with complex processes like wallets or gas fees; users can start playing directly. When they start earning, they become more motivated to explore the overall crypto and Web3 ecosystem. Sasha believes this is a form of innovation because many Web3 games were too complicated for newcomers at that time.

Sasha and his team decided to simplify the process as much as possible. "We understood that people like mining or earning tokens, so I don't think tapping is the key point here; the key point is more like a mechanism suitable for mining. There can be various ways to mine. We realized that people like to see their balances grow, so why not let them see it? At some point, we would tell them, 'If you want to mint your balance now, you can do it anytime.' I think that was the turning point."

Recognizing Telegram's Strong Social Attributes, Believing TON Ecosystem is Still a Blue Ocean

Notcoin has become a powerful Web3 technology application scenario on the TON network. When asked why they chose to develop on the TON network, Sasha stated that this decision stemmed from the strong social attributes and openness of the Telegram platform itself. Telegram provides a unique ecosystem that allows crypto applications and mini-games to be directly embedded into the platform.

"The opportunity is very clear. There is no 'exclusive secret' or anything like that. We just spent enough time researching these fundamentals to understand the opportunities here."

Three years ago, when there were almost no projects on TON, no smart contracts, tokens, or NFTs, Sasha saw the