Telegram Founder Pavel Durov Says He’ll Hold $7 Million Notcoin Gift Until 100x

Notcoin players were feeling generous ahead of Thursday’s NOT token launch, as over half a million players of the viral Telegram-based clicker game donated a share of their in-game coins to Telegram founder Pavel Durov. Now that haul is worth millions of dollars—and Durov says he’s holding for a potential 100x gain.

More than 552,000 players of Notcoin donated a share of their in-game coins to Durov back in February, part of an effort by the Notcoin team—called Open Builders—to thank the Telegram founder for the messaging app that houses the crypto game.

Ultimately, Durov ended up with over 1.03 billion NOT tokens, or just over 1% of the total Notcoin supply on The Open Network (TON). That’s worth about $7.3 million as of this writing, but was a bit lower at $6.8 million when Durov posted earlier Friday.

Durov, who’s estimated to have a $15.5 billion fortune by Forbes, hardly needs the cash. And he’s not selling. But should the NOT token surge in value, he says he’d sell them to ultimately better support Telegram.

1,030,383,291.36 Notcoin ($6.8M USD) were sent as donation to Pavel Durov and Telegram.

Thanks for everything you guys built.https://t.co/ZaBgB22yyg pic.twitter.com/8gmNjbBs3s

— Notcoin Ø (@thenotcoin) May 17, 2024

“Half a million Notcoin users gifted me $6.8 million worth of Notcoin! Thank you,” Durov wrote on Telegram. “I will hold these coins until they turn to $680 million, at which point I will use them to buy more servers for Telegram.”

Notcoin is this year’s biggest gaming token launch so far, debuting at a market cap of nearly $1.5 billion early Thursday. New cryptocurrencies are often volatile, and indeed, NOT has plunged in value since the debut—dropping by 50% to a current price just above $0.007, according to CoinMarketCap.

Even so, NOT is the 101st most valuable cryptocurrency by market cap at $746 million, and racked up more than $1 billion worth of trading volume in its first 24 hours after launch.

Notcoin is set to relaunch its coin-tapping, crypto-earning game, and serve as a platform for additional games in an effort to become the “Netflix of social, viral games,” co-creator Sasha Plotvinov told Decrypt’s GG in April.

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