Tap to find Telegram game is not a genre, it’s a launch strategy: the founder of the Ton Association

With its Telegram mini app, tapping to earn hundreds of millions of players has taken over the crypto game this year. As a result, the Open Network (TON), the Telegram-aligned blockchain where most have launched their tokens for revenue games, has grown in popularity.

But the co-founder of Ton Society thinks that tapping to earn should only be seen as a game mechanic – and an effective way to promote more products to users – focused on the activities of Ton Society.

Jack Booth, founder of Tone Society, told Decrypt at the recent Zebu Live conference in London: “What we're going to see next is projects using the viral mechanic, touch-to-find, as an additional launch strategy.” “I never thought it would become a whole crypto sector. It's always a go-to-market strategy.”

Tap-to-Earn games often spend months in a “mining phase,” where in-game progress is counted against future airdrop chunks. This era is typically built around simple gameplay, but many of these games encourage players to interact with social media posts and videos, invite other players, and try partner games and projects.

This “viral mechanic,” as Booth puts it, has led to tapping to projects that attract hundreds of millions of users. Hamster Kombat, for example, boasted over 300 million players months before it aired. And NoteCoin, the game that started the whole craze, had the most successful crypto game token launch of the year, reaching a market peak just shy of $3 billion.

“It's what you do to build a big community really and quickly and distribute your tokens to as many users as possible,” Booth said on the floor of the Zebu Live show as several paper airplanes flew past from Tons Society. Conference booth. But it's always been, ‘What do you do after that?'

Although they have smaller amount of tokens, some touch games have started a new phase of mining using the same gameplay loop. Meanwhile, others have become more innovative, prompting them to become hubs for launching other games and projects, such as NotCoin.

For some players, the concept of a new and less profitable mining phase makes them boring, especially after getting a medium airdrop, and other times projects are not clear enough about what's next. As a result, many of the touch tokens have plummeted in value following the airdrop. Those are growing pains with the rapid rise of Telegram's crypto games and apps.

“This is where we get the creativity in Tons. Once the projects start tokenization, they will be more clear about the roadmap, Booth told Decrypt. “When we don't have transparency, we've seen what happens: the tokens get penalized during the climate.”

Booth points to Blum as a prime example of this approach in action. Currently, the project has a Telegram mini-app that uses many viral mechanics from other hit-and-run games while its creators work to launch a decentralized exchange (DEX).

This approach has led Blum to have a Telegram channel with over 31 million subscribers, a YouTube channel with nearly 8.3 million subscribers, and a Twitter account with 5.5 million followers. To put this in perspective, centralized exchange Binance has less than 200,000 Telegram subscribers and over 1 million YouTube subscribers, while Coinbase has 6 million Twitter followers – figures for decentralized exchanges are much lower.

“When you build a product now, one day, you're going to be the biggest DEX on the planet,” Boot pointed out.

In his eyes, this is the future of income bending. Companies use viral mechanics to gather a large community before launch, with a user acquisition model that costs less than traditional methods. Tap to Find is a way to grab users and build momentum before launching a stronger product.

Booth says he has found people in the Zebu Ton Hackers League who are building Telegram-based projects and will use them to monetize their respective launch phases. This includes an AI trading bot and a gig marketplace like Fiverr.

“These people are implementing tapping mechanics to get them at their startup level, because that's what's going to get them used,” Booth explains. “It's the next step. We now have a virus mechanic that we use in every app that comes to Tons. So every app has a million users to start with, and then it's up to the app to make changes on the chain.

Edited by Andrew Hayward.

Editor's note: This story has been updated since publication to clarify the Toon Association's role in the ecosystem.