Native Advantages of TON

Firstly, both Notcoin and DOGS have capitalized on the market potential and technical support provided by the TON blockchain, enabling them to spread rapidly in a short time. To understand their success, it’s essential to examine TON’s advantages compared to other public chains.

The first advantage lies in its vast user base. After the legal disputes with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), TON became community-driven and is no longer directly developed by Telegram. However, it maintains close ties with Telegram. According to Telegram’s founder Pavel Durov, as of July 2024, Telegram had 950 million monthly active users globally. Unlike blockchains that build their user base from scratch, TON benefits from this enormous user base, offering incredible market potential. It needs the right trigger to channel many users into its ecosystem.

The second advantage lies in the technical integration between TON and Telegram. As early as 2015, Telegram opened its bot API, allowing developers to write custom bots to extend Telegram’s functionality. In 2017, it expanded the bot’s application scope by supporting payment functions, laying the groundwork for TON’s future integration. In recent years, TON has successfully integrated various on-chain services into the Telegram system through Telegram Mini Apps, enabling users to access TON’s on-chain functionalities within Telegram easily.

Benefiting from the two points mentioned above, along with its product features and market strategies, Notcoin and DOGS have quickly risen to prominence within just a few months, becoming the focal point of market attention. Next, we will delve deeper into the similarities and differences between Notcoin and DOGS regarding narrative background, product differentiation, marketing strategies, token economics, and sustainability.

Narrative Background

In terms of narrative, Notcoin and DOGS possess a strong meme-driven nature, which easily resonates with community participants and allows for widespread dissemination.

Notcoin is essentially a click-based mini-game on Telegram. Its low entry barrier has attracted many users to participate, and its slogan, “Probably nothing,” alongside a nine-page blank whitepaper, adds a thick layer of meme culture. By combining GameFi and meme elements, Notcoin quickly gained public popularity. Additionally, Notcoin has received public support from TON Labs and the TON Foundation, which effectively endorses the project and strengthens community confidence, granting it a degree of legitimacy.

On the other hand, DOGS is a purely meme coin project, featuring the iconic black-and-white dog image derived from Spotty, a mascot created by Telegram founder Pavel Durov during a charity auction. Although DOGS lacks the gameplay aspect that Notcoin offers, every user can claim a certain amount of DOGS based on the age and activity level of their Telegram account, with no barriers to entry. Users only need to click on the DOGS Telegram bot to claim their tokens in one click. This extremely simple participation process, combined with the community-centric token distribution and the meme coin’s dog theme—always popular in the cryptocurrency community—quickly fostered a strong sense of community consensus around DOGS in a short period of time.

Product Differentiation

In the cryptocurrency community, a well-known saying goes: “Speculate on the new, not on the old.” This phrase accurately reflects the fact that whenever the market introduces new narratives or gameplay, it signals another potential opportunity for quick wealth, attracting a flood of eager participants and sparking a craze in the market. The phenomena of DeFi Summer in 2020, the NFT boom in 2021, and the Play-to-Earn wave in GameFi all perfectly illustrate this market behavior. Notcoin and DOGS capitalized on this speculative mindset of users, leveraging TON’s inherent advantages to differentiate their gameplay from other products and capture the market’s attention.

Notcoin pioneered the Tap-to-Earn gameplay, where players accumulate token points simply by tapping a coin at the center of the screen. The game’s simplicity, combined with its presentation as a Telegram mini app, makes it accessible on both mobile and desktop platforms, significantly lowering the entry barrier and encouraging user participation.

Following Notcoin’s success, many copycat projects emerged within the TON ecosystem, hoping to capitalize on its popularity and seize a share of the market. However, the influx of similar projects diluted the uniqueness of Tap-to-Earn gameplay, causing users to lose interest in most of the new projects. In response, DOGS did not focus on developing new gameplay but instead targeted Telegram’s native user base. By utilizing Telegram bots to widely distribute tokens, DOGS differentiated itself from Notcoin and continued to ride the TON ecosystem’s wave of popularity. Moreover, by distributing tokens based on users’ Telegram account status, DOGS strengthened its connection with the community, helping it stand out from countless other meme coins.

Promotional Strategies

Both Notcoin and DOGS utilized an invite-based viral marketing strategy for their promotion: the more people you refer, the more token rewards you can earn. However, there are distinct differences in how each project implemented this strategy.

In Notcoin, players could not only speed up their coin-earning process by inviting friends but also join or form teams to compete for leaderboard rankings, earning additional rewards. Since the game itself is easy to play and offers a competitive environment, users were motivated to actively invite new players to strengthen their team. According to Notcoin’s founder, Sasha Plotvinov, Notcoin allocated no marketing budget, yet an impressive 94% of players joined the game through spontaneous invitations from others, demonstrating the success of this strategy.

On the other hand, DOGS heavily relied on Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs) for promotion. By leveraging their influence and popularity, DOGS rapidly spread across major online communities, successfully generating buzz on social platforms. This approach sparked widespread discussion, particularly on platforms like X (formerly Twitter) and Telegram, where DOGS gained significant attention. On its launch day, DOGS-related topics reached over a million users, creating a massive viral effect.

Token Economics

Many tokens issued in 2024 face the problem of low liquidity and high valuations. A low initial circulating supply indicates that a large number of tokens are yet to be unlocked. While this can drive speculation and increase token prices in the short term, it poses challenges for long-term growth. As more tokens are unlocked, there’s a high risk that prices will stagnate or even decline over time. This phenomenon has led to widespread pessimism about new project tokens and decreased user participation.

Amid this negative market sentiment, both Notcoin and DOGS promoted a “fully circulating” token distribution model. Aside from reserving a portion for operations, marketing, liquidity, and team shares, the rest was fully allocated to the community with no lock-up periods. According to official statements, the initial circulating supply of Notcoin and DOGS accounted for 78% and 93.95% of the total token supply, respectively. This transparent distribution model significantly restored user confidence and attracted an increasing number of new participants.

Sustainability

Most projects experience a rapid decline in attention and token prices following their initial token issuance, often due to heavy selling pressure, and eventually fade from the market’s memory. Ensuring sustainability is a challenge every project must face, especially for meme-heavy projects like Notcoin and DOGS, which have weaker value capture capabilities.

To address this, Notcoin has evolved from a simple click-based game into a launch platform for TON games. Users can stake their $NOT tokens to participate in new games and earn rewards, while maintaining the original team and alliance mechanisms. Additionally, Notcoin has actively partnered with other notable projects in the ecosystem, such as Catizen and TonGifts, allowing users to spend $NOT directly. Notcoin has also collaborated with DeFi protocol 1inch and on-chain proof protocol Sign to launch a startup accelerator called Triangle. This accelerator aims to support new teams within the TON ecosystem, with the broader vision of enabling millions of people to use Web3 seamlessly and easily. Through these deep partnerships, Notcoin continues to play a significant role in the TON ecosystem, driving its ongoing development.

As for DOGS, since its token launch, it has yet to reveal any concrete plans for its next steps or collaborations with other projects. Whether DOGS can maintain its momentum and sustain community consensus in the long term remains to be seen.

Conclusion

From the analysis above, it is evident that the overall market strategies of Notcoin and DOGS are quite similar. Both projects focus on targeting community users, leveraging GameFi and meme narratives to create a light-hearted and engaging atmosphere. They differentiate themselves from existing products and use low-barrier entry methods along with viral marketing to attract large numbers of users. This shows that both projects clearly understand the needs of their audience and have a keen sense of the market’s dynamic shifts, crafting appropriate development strategies with different execution methods.

The biggest difference between Notcoin and DOGS lies in the sustainability of their projects. After its token launch, Notcoin chose to deepen its integration within the TON ecosystem, using its large user base and successful experience to continue driving ecosystem growth. DOGS, on the other hand, has not yet announced any further plans, leaving its future direction unclear.

Regardless of how Notcoin and DOGS evolve, their market strategies and success stories provide valuable lessons for other projects and highlight the vast potential of the TON ecosystem.