Comparison and analysis of DOGS and Notcoin: in-depth exploration of success path and market strategy

Native Advantages of TON

First of all, Notcoin and DOGS have both successfully utilized the market potential and technical support of TON to rapidly spread in a short period of time. Therefore, let’s first understand the advantages that TON has compared to other public chains.

First, it has a large user base. As we all know, after the legal dispute with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) of the United States, TON is now driven by the community instead of being developed by Telegram itself, but it still has a close relationship with Telegram. According to Pavel Durov, the founder of Telegram, as of July 2024, Telegram has 950 million monthly active users worldwide. Unlike other public chains that need to cultivate users from scratch, TON itself relies on Telegram’s huge user base and has amazing market potential. It only needs a suitable opportunity to attract a large number of users into the ecosystem.

The second is the integration of TON and Telegram. As early as 2015, Telegram opened the robot API, allowing developers to write custom robot extensions to enhance the functionality of Telegram. In 2017, payment functionality was added, further expanding the application scope of robots and laying the foundation for the future integration of TON. In recent years, TON has also successfully integrated various on-chain services into the Telegram system in the form of Telegram Mini App, allowing users to easily use TON’s on-chain features on Telegram.

Benefiting from the above two points, combined with its own product features and market strategy, Notcoin and DOGS have quickly surged in the market and become the focus of follow in a few months. Next, we will explore in depth the similarities and differences between Notcoin and DOGS from the perspectives of narrative background, product differentiation, promotional strategy, Token economy, and sustainability.

Narrative Background

In terms of narrative, both Notcoin and DOGS have a highly memetic quality that can easily resonate with community participants and achieve widespread dissemination.

Notcoin is essentially a click-through game on Telegram. Its low-threshold gameplay has attracted a large number of users to participate. With the slogan ‘Probably nothing’, it released a nine-page blank White Paper, adding a strong meme color. By combining GameFi and Meme, it quickly gained popularity among the public. In addition, Notcoin has also received public support from TON Labs and TON Foundation, which is equivalent to endorsing Notcoin, enhancing the community’s confidence in the project, and to some extent, giving it legitimacy.

DOGS is a complete meme coin project, whose iconic black and white dog image comes from the mascot Spotty created by Telegram founder Pavel Durov at a charity auction. Although it lacks the playfulness of Notcoin, every user can receive a certain amount of DOGS based on their seniority and activity status of their Telegram account, without any threshold, just by clicking the DOGS Telegram bot. With a minimalist way to participate and Token distribution based on the community, plus the meme coin themed around “dogs” which has always been popular among the Cryptocurrency community, DOGS has quickly gained some community Consensus.

Product Differentiation

In the Cryptocurrency community, there is a well-known saying: ‘Speculate on the new, not the old.’ This phrase aptly reflects that whenever the market proposes a new narrative or gameplay, it represents another potential opportunity for getting rich quick, thus always attracting a crazy influx of players and causing a frenzy in the market. The Decentralized Finance Summer of 2020, the Non-fungible Token summer of 2021, and the emergence of Play-to-Earn in GameFi perfectly illustrate this market status. Meanwhile, Notcoin and DOGS grasp the speculative psychology of most users, leveraging the unique advantage of TON, making significant differentiation in gameplay from other products, and thus capturing market attention.

Notcoin is the first to create the Tap-to-Earn gameplay, where players only need to click on the coin in the center of the screen to quickly accumulate Token points. With a simple game mode presented in the form of a Telegram mini app, it allows gameplay on both mobile phones and computers, significantly lowering the participation threshold and encouraging active user participation.

After the success of Notcoin, many imitations appeared in the TON ecosystem, hoping to share the market benefits with its popularity. However, too many imitations have led to the loss of uniqueness of the Tap-to-Earn gameplay, and also caused users to lack interest in most new projects. Therefore, DOGS did not focus on gameplay, abandoned the gaming nature of the project, and instead targeted Telegram’s native users, and widely distributed Tokens with the help of robots. This not only helped DOGS and Notcoin differentiate themselves, but also continued the TON ecosystem’s momentum. The practice of issuing Tokens based on the status of Telegram accounts also strengthened the connection between DOGS and the community, making it stand out from countless meme coins.

Promotion Strategy

In terms of promotion, Notcoin and DOGS both use an invite-only viral marketing approach: referring more people can earn more Token rewards, however, there are still some obvious differences in implementation between the two.

In addition to inviting fren to accelerate their own earning of coins, Notcoin players can also join or form teams to compete for rankings and receive more rewards. As the game itself is easy to learn and provides a competitive environment, it encourages users to actively invite more new players to enhance the team’s strength. According to Sasha Plotvinov, the founder of Notcoin, no marketing budget has been allocated, and as many as 94% of players have entered the game through spontaneous invitations from others, demonstrating the success of its strategy.

DOGS quickly spread through a large number of KOL promotions, leveraging their influence and popularity to generate hot discussions in major communities, especially on X and Telegram, and sparking widespread discussions and follow. On the first day of launch, topics related to DOGS reached over a million users, creating a huge ripple effect.

Token Economy

In 2024, Tokens issued by issuances often suffer from the problem of low circulation and high valuation. A low initial circulation indicates that a large amount of Tokens are yet to be unlocked. Although this may lead to better speculation and higher Token prices, in the long run, due to the substantial amount of unlocked shares, Token prices are unlikely to grow in the future, and may even continue to decline for a long time. This phenomenon leads to a generally negative market outlook for Tokens issued by new projects, and drops user participation.

In such a negative market sentiment, Notcoin and DOGS both boast a ‘fully liquid’ Token distribution, with a portion reserved for operational sales, providing Liquidity, and team shares, and the remainder completely distributed to the community, with no lock-up period. According to the official statement, the initial circulation of Notcoin and DOGS accounts for 78% and 93.95% of the total Token supply, undoubtedly boosting user confidence and attracting more and more new users to participate.

Sustainability

The vast majority of projects will quickly lose their popularity and token prices will continue to fall due to a large amount of selling pressure after the issuanceToken. Then, they will gradually be forgotten by the market. Therefore, how to maintain sustainability is a problem that every project must face, especially for meme projects like Notcoin and DOGS with strong meme nature and weak value capture ability.

To this end, Notcoin has transformed from a simple click game to a TON game launch platform, where users can stake their $NOT Token to participate in new games and earn rewards, while continuing the original teaming and alliance mechanism. At the same time, Notcoin is actively cooperating with other well-known projects in the ecosystem such as Catizen and TonGifts, allowing users to directly consume $NOT. In addition, Notcoin is also collaborating with Decentralized Finance protocol 1inch and on-chain proof protocol Sign to launch an incubation accelerator named Triangle, providing assistance to new startup teams in the TON ecosystem, with the vision of enabling millions of people to seamlessly and friendly use Web3. Through collaboration with other projects, Notcoin continues to exert influence in the TON ecosystem, continuously driving the development of TON.

After DOGS launched coin, it has not yet disclosed its next plan or cooperation with other projects. It remains to be seen whether its project development and community Consensus can be sustained in the long term.

Conclusion

From the analysis of the above aspects, it can be seen that Notcoin and DOGS adopt consistent market strategies in general. Both choose community users as the main audience, create a relaxed and fun atmosphere using GameFi and Meme narratives, differentiate themselves from existing products, and attract a large number of users through low-threshold participation and viral marketing. This indicates that they both have a clear understanding of the audience’s needs and can also capture market dynamics sensitively and formulate corresponding development strategies, albeit with different execution methods.

In addition, the biggest difference between Notcoin and DOGS lies in the sustainability of the projects. After launching the coin, Notcoin chooses to continue deepening in the TON ecosystem, relying on its large user base and successful experience to continue promoting the development of the ecosystem; DOGS has not announced any further plans for the project, so it is unclear where it will go in the future.

However, regardless of how Notcoin and DOGS develop in the future, their market strategies and success stories are worth emulating by all project parties, and they have also enabled more people to see the ecological potential of TON.