The Meteoric Rise: How TON and Telegram Games Captured the World
Originally envisaged by Telegram founders, TON was rebooted by the TON Foundation after regulatory challenges. It had by mid 2024 integrated seamlessly among Telegram's 1 billion+ strong users for zero fee payments as well as mini apps merging messaging and game like interactions. Notcoin sparked the tap to earn frenzy: a bot where users tapped on a coin symbol for NOT tokens, later airdropping as well as listing on exchanges.
The hype was real. Notcoin alone amassed 35 million users, driving TON's daily active wallets from 2.9 million to 32 million in months. Other games like Hamster Kombat and TapSwap followed, turning Telegram into a play to earn gaming platform. TON's price surged to an all time high of $8.24 in June 2024, fueled by this viral adoption. It wasn't just fun it was a growth hack that introduced crypto to the masses without the usual barriers.
Notcoin's Nosedive: From Viral Sensation to Penny Stock
Notcoin personified the boom. It started life as an ordinary Telegram bot but paid tappers tokens worth as much as $0.02896 just after it was listed. Early investors cashed out large but the fairytale could not last. NOT sees trading as meager as $0.001617 in October 2025 an incredible 94.42% decline on its ATH. Its market cap is at $160.78 million while its circulating supply hovers at max at 99.43 billion tokens.
What went wrong? The shine wore off after the post airdrop. The co founders of Notcoin even pronounced the tap to earn paradigm probably dead at Token2049 Dubai due to superficial gameplay and short term lack of engagement. Botting and multi account farming deflated value, as well as dumps being preferred over holds due to tokenomics. it just feels like the project is dead. Efforts such as staking and community reward sharing not with standing, NOT's 24hour volume of $22 million betrays residual interest but the drop reveals how hype by itself cannot maintain value.
The Clicker Craze Fizzles: Why Telegram Games Are Losing Interest
- Homogenization and Lack of Depth: Most games boiled down to repetitive tapping. As one analysis puts it, the issues of homogenization and lack of depth in Clicker games gradually emerge, leading to a backlash.
- Airdrop Hype Rather Than Substance: Players came for free tokens but departed when the rewards ceased. As for many Telegram mini games, the number of participants decreases greatly when the newness wears off.
- Bots and Saturation: Farming bots generated phony numbers, and copycats flooded the market.
- Shifting Meta: nobody wants to talk about telegram because that meta and hype died. The ecosystem evolved towards more mature games, but the harm was already done.
Conclusion: Death of a trend or a new start for Ton?
With the death of tap to earn games of Telegram the price of ton dropped pretty hard ( around 50% decline) and it would be a miracle if we see any new tap to earn game getting to any success . However Telegram has been replacing these games with a new trend called gifts that is given to users exactly like NFT'S, you can trade them or collect them and show them off on your profile picture, do think that this new innovation will replace the tap to earn games hype ? I think NOT .
