TON Revived Crypto Gaming: How Notcoin and Pocket Rocket Kickstarted the Phenomenon of Telegram-Based P2E Clickers

By early 2024, GameFi used to remain a niche industry. The tides shifted The Open Network (TON) coming into picture. Its main feature – facilitated dApps development with its interface transfer directly into Telegram – has revealed a wide potential not only for the applications, but also for play-to-earn games.

For many years, blockchain gaming remained in the background of other Web3 novelties, until its potential was finally recognized in 2024.

To explain the reasons behind this success, the article carries out a retrospective journey to the roots of GameFi, unveils the play-to-earn concept, and highlights key milestones of a formerly niche sector.

CryptoKitties and Axie Infinity: How It All Began

While blockchain-based gaming attempts to tap into mass recognition, these efforts did not seek any remarkable success until 2017 – the year when the renowned CryptoKitties was launched.

Powered by the Ethereum blockchain, CryptoKitties gameplay was put simply: players could purchase, breed, and trade virtual NFT-cats that had different visual features of varying levels of rarity. While its gameplay appeared to be plain, it earned the hearts and investments just after its five-day beta launch started in November 2017.

Less than a month later, CryptoKitties shook the community as its in-game cat Genesis was sold for 247 ETH, equaled for ca. $117,000 back in the day. Eventually, the next year the developer of the game Dapper Labs raised $12 million from several top venture firms.

This was a literal game-changer. In 2018, CryptoKitties could boast of 1 million cats being bred with a volume of 3.2 million transactions on its smart contracts. Not to mention collaborations with celebrities and the German ZKM Centre for Art and Media Kalsruhe museum.

However, the success eventually ceased. By 2022, the game had fallen to generally fewer than 100 sales a day, for a total value of less than $10,000. And while CryptoKitties’ showtime faded out as quickly as it flared up, it contributed to a larger achievement – becoming a kickstarter for the future of GameFi.

Just around the time when CryptoKitties were gaining recognition, one of its creators Nguyen Thanh Trung was working on a new project, a game that would kickstart the phenomenon of crypto clickers – Axie Infinity.

Axie Infinity was set up as a competitive game with an “idle battle” system, inspired from Final Fantasy Tactics and Idle Heroes. But crucially, it presented an elaborate in-game economy, Ethereum-powered virtual market, where players could buy, sell, and trade the resources they earn in the game.

Simultaneously, The Sandbox was rallying through the community. This platform, which brought the brand name of an iconic 2021 crafting game, offered making in-game items via toolbox and then selling them for a game-specific cryptocurrency.

All these games struggled through the timespan, and some of them ended dramatically, but, importantly, they established the play-to-earn (P2E) concept – a category of blockchain-based games with player-owned economies enabled via in-game assets represented by tokens and NFTs.

The P2E model became so demanded amid the 2021 bull market that it caught the attention of game development behemoths – from Ubisoft and Electronic Arts (EA) to Take Two (Grand Theft Auto series distributor) and Square Enix.

However, such a tendency eventually caused a backlash, becoming one of the reasons for GameFi lying low until 2024. Apart from downgrading popularity of NFTs and bear market beginning in the late 2021, gamedev studios faced fierce criticism for blockchain games from the players, who advocated “play to have fun” and “play to contribute” games.

How TON Revived Crypto Gaming

By early 2024, GameFi used to remain a niche industry. The tides shifted The Open Network (TON) coming into the picture. Its main feature – facilitated dApps development with its interface transfer directly into Telegram – revealed a wide potential not only for the applications, but also for play-to-earn games.

The hallmark of TON’s contribution to GameFi turned out to be Notcoin. Developed by Open Builders, a team specializing in creating viral social games, Notcoin made its debut in November 2023 as a closed beta available exclusively on Telegram.

The idea of Notcoin was not new or standout: it operated on a straightforward concept, allowing users to earn coins by simply tapping on the yellow coin in smartphone screens and receiving a reward. The gameplay was also spiced up with various boost mechanics, including bonuses, backgrounds, and coin skins.

Notcoin turned out to become a complete success. Throughout the mining (or ‘tapping’) phase, users collectively generated over 8 trillion taps, which converted into more than 17 trillion Notcoins within the game.

Following the mining phase, players were rewarded with an airdrop of NOT, an actual TON-built token. And this also came as a total success. Being greatly

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