Notcoin's Plotvinov On Making Blockchain Accessible Through Gaming: 'A Game Creates Strong Emotional Connection'

Amid the transformative rise of digital currencies and blockchain technology, one project has captured global attention for its simplicity and ingenuity: Notcoin. Conceived by Sasha Plotvinov and his team at Open Builders, what began as a straightforward clicker game has blossomed into a viral phenomenon, drawing over 35 million users on Telegram in record time.

As the creative mind behind Notcoin, a wildly popular Telegram-based clicker game, Sasha and his team have redefined how people interact with blockchain.

In an exclusive interview with Benzinga, Sasha shares his goal on how to transform Notcoin into a vibrant, community-powered gaming ecosystem which can bridge the gap between entertainment and blockchain technology.

How was your journey with Notcoin from 70,000 users to 35 million users. Share with us the success story so far.

The journey is interesting. There is a saying that it’s not the station, it’s a journey, but maybe it’s who you become in this journey, right? So, the team transforms a lot right now, and I really like to see many things that happens right now that did not happen there at the time. And, I mean, every time a person creates something big, it changes them as well. So, imagine you as a developer, you always worked with applications that would have 100K users, that’s it, and then 10 million and it moved on further.

From my perspective, I want to not only build it, but also shape the vibe. I’m still doing all my Notcoin social media myself, just for fun. It’s just some kind of thing that I just don’t want to delegate to anyone. About new games, all the new projects that we’re working with, we help docs, for example, to basically, the core idea of the mining through your age in Telegram is something that we contributed in some part of the product as well.

You need to make sure that the games are new and authentic enough, so people are not bored before, because right now, it’s hard to attract people to top tier.

Share something about the Tap to Earn and why do you think this Tap to Earn model resonates so strongly with users?

In Tap to earn model, you just tap to the something, button, or a coin or something, and then you see how more and more coins are adding to your balance. Then you can, let’s say, spend these coins to some in-app boosts and so on and so on, and then you can compete with others. Basically, it’s more like, again, it’s just a simple mechanic that allows people to mine coins. You can do this in many ways. You cannot ask to tap. You can ask to open it.

So, I mean, it’s just different ways to do the same thing. Make a distribution of coins across millions of users while they’re doing some actions for that.

Which marketing strategies were most effective in building Not’s user base?

I think if you’re talking about real practical advice and so on, I don’t see that purchasing traffic as a way because it’s just, you know, you’ll spend too much. And usually, if you need to spend too much money to traffic, that’s the smallest thing and not really engaging with your product. It doesn’t make any sense. It’s just wasting your money. So, in my opinion, Notcoin and all other successful apps, they’re doing just some mechanic within the game or app that basically using motivation that users have.

And then the horizontal layer is just going broad and that’s where it starts. It means that you just create a system when people are motivated enough to invite other people. Basically, that’s the pure advice, how to make whatever 10, 50 million user applications.

How does Notcoin manage technical challenges with such rapid user growth?

We have learned a lot. At the beginning, it was hard. Then we figured out how to do stuff. And then in couple of months we became professionals, we started advising other apps how to do that because we already knew many, many limitations, many, many ways how to optimize it and so on. So basically, there are two difficulties. First one is just data server and database and all this stuff. So, you can work with different backend language and stack. You can work with different databases.

You can work with different approaches, how to build these things. And because of that, some spikes might occur. So, you must be smart on building this in the remaining components. Another thing is the Telegram API, building on top of Telegram, obviously. So, Telegram has its own limitations. So, for example, you cannot send more than two million-ish notifications per day. If you’re building the app that gives 50 million people, like, it’s hard to engage them without any notification experience.

You must learn how to navigate through all these limitations. And the better you adjust, in general, the better you survive.

What strategies are in place to keep users engaged over the long term?

It’s the same how games work in general. You see, like, what kind of games usually people play for a long time? I think there are two types. First one is that when you have cycles, let’s say Tetris, you have a cycle. You start, the speed is growing up, then you got some score, you start again from scratch. Fortnite, the same thing. You are deploying with 100 people, the circle gets smaller, smaller, smaller, then you repeat again, once again, if you win or lose, it doesn’t matter.

So that kind of cycles, Counterstrike, everything. I mean, this is kind of games that people playing for many, many, many years. I think that’s one of the ways. Another way is to go with long, you know, kind of building a character, building a profile. Let’s say World of Warcraft, people are playing this for many, many years. EVE Online, like EVE Online is crazy.

It’s like 16% of people that played EVE Online on the first year, 10 years ago, are still playing the game, That’s quite huge. People are so stick to this game and all the new users are coming as well.

How does Notcoin plan to differentiate itself as more projects adopt similar models?

I think the only way is basically just to be ready for a change. So, it’s true. Everything that worked in April doesn’t work right now. Everything that worked on the summer doesn’t work right now.

Your advertisement model doesn’t work anymore because everyone can dump their price. Their community is more kind of, how to say that, like not that loyal, not that cool, not that wealthy. And they always will have lower price. You cannot fight and compete with them, right? So, we must learn and see, okay, what model we can use right now. Right now, we think our advantage is to build things with soul inside. Let’s say we help projects to build games that are really touching, nice games, that it’s not just make people addictive or something.

It’s more about real emotional experience that you have for some time. Again, Pixel Battle is a great example. Another one, Lost Dogs. I don’t see a big difference between TV show, game, book, because it’s all imagined, some worlds that are kind of existing in imagination and people, they can play and they can believe in this world. You literally start believing in this in-game economy as a real one because people can trade with each other, some things, some items, some goods and so on. It’s like, it’s really the whole markets that that exists within the game.

What's next for Notcoin as it continues to grow?

Two things. First one, we learn how to do these experiences, games, all those things. We just want to replicate it. We have some teams that are working right now on different stuff. We help them, we build together. We’re making sure that it’s not just a random clicker or something. It’s just interesting. Emotionally game creates emotional connection. This is the one thing; this is a really good side because we learned a lot in our experience right now. And we can really use this expertise to launch projects to 10, 20, 50 million people. That’s no brainer.

On the other side, we understood business part as well. So, we know how to right now to make a business from this. And also from our community side, what we do right now, we’re trying to put Notcoin community holders in the center of every single thing we’ve built. Let’s say we help game to go and be published through Notcoin. And we have agreement that 20% of the stock of this game will go to the Notcoin community.

So that’s the way how we basically attract more and more value into the ecosystem. We do what we know how to do, and we just continue to grow the ecosystem. Sometimes I think we switch our tactical plans, but the strategy is the same.