[Telegram founder Pavel Durov said he will hold the $7 million Notcoin gift until 100 times]
Ahead of Thursday's NOT token launch, more than half a million players addicted to Telegram's clicker game Notcoin generously donated their in-game tokens to Telegram founder Pavel Durov. Those donations are now worth millions of dollars, and Durov said he will hold onto the tokens in anticipation of a potential 100x return.
More than 552,000 Notcoin players donated their in-game tokens to Durov in February, an effort by the Notcoin team (called Open Builders) to thank the Telegram founder for providing the platform.
Ultimately, Durov held over 1.03 billion NOT tokens, accounting for just over 1% of the total Notcoin supply on The Open Network (TON). The value of the tokens was around $7.3 million at the time of writing, but was worth $6.8 million when Durov posted earlier on Friday.
Durov, whose fortune is estimated at $15.5 billion by Forbes, has no need for the money and has no plans to sell the tokens. However, if the NOT tokens surge in value, he will sell them to better support Telegram.
"Half a million Notcoin users donated $6.8 million worth of Notcoin! Thank you," Durov wrote on Telegram. “I will hold these tokens until they become $680 million, at which point I will use them to buy more servers for Telegram.”
Notcoin is the largest gaming token offering this year, debuting early Thursday with a market capitalization of nearly $1.5 billion. New cryptocurrencies are often highly volatile, and NOT has dropped a whopping 50% since its debut and currently trades at just over $0.007, according to CoinMarketCap.
Even so, NOT remains the 101st largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, valued at $746 million, and accumulated over $1 billion in trading volume within the first 24 hours of its launch.
Co-creator Sasha Plotvinov told Decrypt in April that Notcoin planned to relaunch its click-and-click, cryptocurrency-earning game as a platform for other games, with the goal of becoming "the Netflix of social, viral games."
