Forward from: NOT Wise Community
Well. π
In 2024 (or, more precisely, beginning in late 2023) a fascinating series of events occurred:
Notcoin reshaped the narrative around TON. It was no longer seen merely as an old Telegram-related crypto project whose original incarnation, Gram, had been halted following the SEC case.
Instead, Notcoin demonstrated that TON could be seamlessly integrated into Telegram Mini Apps and that Telegram itself could become a distribution layer for consumer Web3 applications.
The emerging vision was essentially Telegram as the Web3 equivalent of WeChat:
Mini Apps as applications, Telegram as the distribution, identity, and social layer, and TON as the financial and ownership layer underneath - open, permissionless, and without a traditional centralized financial intermediary.
Notcoin was the proof of concept that this model could reach tens of millions of ordinary users.
But what happened next? π€
The market made its choice.
Why spend months building something genuinely useful, developing ecosystem infrastructure, or experimenting with new products when you could simply copy, or, more accurately, plagiarize - whatever had just gone viral?
Notcoin proved that Telegram could distribute a Web3 product to tens of millions of users. But instead of treating that as proof that entirely new categories of products could be built on TON, much of the market interpreted it as a recipe:
Mini App + simple mechanic + referrals + points + promised token = users.
Hundreds of projects began reproducing essentially the same model. Innovation was replaced by iteration, and iteration quickly became imitation.
The original narrative - Telegram as a distribution layer for a new generation of consumer applications - gradually narrowed into something much less ambitious:
π« Telegram as a distribution layer for speculation.
Instead of asking βWhat useful product becomes possible because Telegram and TON exist together?β, the market increasingly asked:
βWhat can we launch quickly enough to suck money before the next project does?β
Wanna more? β¨β¨
In 2024 (or, more precisely, beginning in late 2023) a fascinating series of events occurred:
Notcoin reshaped the narrative around TON. It was no longer seen merely as an old Telegram-related crypto project whose original incarnation, Gram, had been halted following the SEC case.
Instead, Notcoin demonstrated that TON could be seamlessly integrated into Telegram Mini Apps and that Telegram itself could become a distribution layer for consumer Web3 applications.
The emerging vision was essentially Telegram as the Web3 equivalent of WeChat:
Mini Apps as applications, Telegram as the distribution, identity, and social layer, and TON as the financial and ownership layer underneath - open, permissionless, and without a traditional centralized financial intermediary.
Notcoin was the proof of concept that this model could reach tens of millions of ordinary users.
But what happened next? π€
The market made its choice.
Why spend months building something genuinely useful, developing ecosystem infrastructure, or experimenting with new products when you could simply copy, or, more accurately, plagiarize - whatever had just gone viral?
Notcoin proved that Telegram could distribute a Web3 product to tens of millions of users. But instead of treating that as proof that entirely new categories of products could be built on TON, much of the market interpreted it as a recipe:
Mini App + simple mechanic + referrals + points + promised token = users.
Hundreds of projects began reproducing essentially the same model. Innovation was replaced by iteration, and iteration quickly became imitation.
The original narrative - Telegram as a distribution layer for a new generation of consumer applications - gradually narrowed into something much less ambitious:
π« Telegram as a distribution layer for speculation.
Instead of asking βWhat useful product becomes possible because Telegram and TON exist together?β, the market increasingly asked:
βWhat can we launch quickly enough to suck money before the next project does?β
Wanna more? β¨β¨