NOT drops 55% as airdrop farmers sell off post-exchange launch

Notcoin (NOT), a play-to-earn clicker gaming application on Telegram, has seen its price plummet by 55% after securing listings on major crypto exchanges.

At the time of writing, NOT was trading at $0.006414, with a 24-hour trading volume of $1.35 billion. The token’s market cap has fallen to $661 million, according to CoinMarketCap.

Notcoin is a web3 gaming project that started on Jan. 1 within The Open Network (TON) ecosystem. It operates as a mini-application within Telegram, allowing users to earn coins with a simple tap on their phone screens. Earnings can be increased through several additional activities.

The game’s mining phase ended on April 1. Initially, the Notcoin team intended to launch the NOT token on April 20 to coincide with the Bitcoin halving, but the launch was delayed twice to ensure a smooth rollout.

NOT has received considerable attention in recent weeks, following announcements by crypto exchanges such as Binance, OKX, KuCoin, and Bybit that they will add the token to their launchpads.

Following distribution across several exchanges, Notcoin began trading at a fully diluted valuation (FDV) of more than $1 billion just a few hours after the airdrop debut on May 16.

The token generated $294 million in volume during its first hour of trading. However, despite reportedly onboarding 35 million users into its ecosystem, the gaming token began to decline sharply. As airdrop farmers continued to sell off their tokens, NOT experienced a 55% crash.

NOT’s decline mirrors the pattern of many cryptocurrency airdrops, which often experience massive sell-offs post-launch. On Oct. 20, Layer-1 blockchain Aptos saw its native coin, APT, rapidly fall after a 20 million coin airdrop. Similarly, SocialFi project friend.tech saw a 98% price plunge for its FRIEND token shortly after its May 3 debut.

Many expected NOT to spark a resurgence in the gaming token category, but it is currently underperforming expectations. Gaming tokens have generally underperformed in 2024, especially compared to other trending categories like AI and meme tokens.