Why the ‘Notcoin’ Token Launch Was Delayed—And When It’s Coming

The NOT token launch for viral Telegram-based game Notcoin was originally planned to take place on or around April 20, coinciding with the Bitcoin halving. But last week, the team announced that it would be delayed, with a vague new launch target of “soon.”

At the Token 2049 conference in Dubai last week, Decrypt’s GG spoke with Open Builders founder Sasha Plotvinov about why the token launch was pushed back, and got an updated ETA when to expect the token to go live on The Open Network (TON). And yes, it’s soon.

Plotvinov said that with three weeks to go, the target date of April 20 was compelling. Not only is it a “funny number,” as he told Decrypt’s Sander Lutz in the video interview below—after all, 420 is a prominent meme number—but it was also the estimated date for the quadrennial Bitcoin halving event.

The halving was a “good event to be linked to,” he said—and ultimately they thought, “Why not?”

But as the date neared, his team decided that they needed more time to ensure that the Notcoin token launch would go off without a hitch, given the potentially millions of players all trying to claim the token at once.

“We just realized that having literally like 35 million people that want to go on-chain and do some stuff is a really, really challenging task,” he said. “You have to make sure that on the one hand, you will not ruin everything—you know, that the blockchain will work, infrastructure will work, wallets, whatever, at the same time.”

“You cannot limit users, or you cannot afford to allow some people to mint tokens and then the rest wait until everything will start working again,” he continued. “We realized that there are a bunch of things we need to do before the actual listing to make it as smooth as possible.”

Now the Notcoin team has what it believes (or hopes) is the “perfect solution,” he explained, and the NOT token is targeted to launch at the end of this month.

“From our perspective, the end of April is perfect still. I don’t really care about moving it a little bit further, to be honest. The better preparation we have, the better,” Plotvinov said. “I don’t think that everyone would like to rush here.”

The Notcoin launch is sure to be one of the largest tests to date for The Open Network, which was originally created by messaging app Telegram. Plotvinov said that launching pre-market vouchers, which let heavy players trade some of their in-game Notcoin allocation via NFTs, was an early test—but the real event is just around the corner.

“We learned a lot of things,” he said of the vouchers launch. “Now we’re just ready for the big splash.”

Additional reporting by Sander Lutz

Edited by Stacy Elliott.