Toncoin Spikes on Notcoin Rollout as Bitcoin, Ethereum Trade Flat

Toncoin, the native cryptocurrency of The Open Network (TON), is one of the biggest gainers atop the crypto markets Thursday amid launch news about one of the network’s most anticipated tokens. And it comes as the two largest overall coins, Bitcoin and Ethereum, have barely moved over the last day.

Over the past 24 hours, TON is up nearly 13% to a current price of $6.46, per data from CoinGecko. That makes it the second-largest coin in the top 100 cryptocurrencies by market cap behind Akash Network (AKT), an AI-centric cloud computing project that’s seen a 16% jump on the day.

Much of the gains came after The Open Network project Notcoin, a viral Telegram-based game, announced that its anticipated token NOT will be launched on May 16. The project attracted 35 million players ahead of April 1, when the “mining phase” ended, and the launch has been on the horizon for weeks amid a couple of previously missed listing targets.

One of the biggest TON price increases so far on Thursday came shortly after crypto exchange Binance announced that it would offer billions of NOT tokens as rewards to its customers via pre-listing staking rewards.

Along with a similar campaign from rival exchange OKX, more than 4 billion NOT tokens will be distributed via such rewards initiatives. OKX users, in particular, will need to stake TON tokens to earn rewards, which could drive an increase in Toncoin purchases in the days ahead.

In the last day, perpetual-centric decentralized exchange (DEX) dYdX also announced support for Toncoin, while Hong Kong’s HashKey exchange listed TON on Thursday. With today’s price action added in, Toncoin is now up 24% over the last week.