Former Binance Executive Launches New Exchange?
Recently, the click-screen games in the TON ecosystem have seen a surge in popularity. In addition to Notcoin, games like Hamster Kombat and tapswap have also surpassed 30 million users. Currently, 5 out of the top 10 channels on Telegram are crypto community channels.
Among them, Blum is a rapidly rising community, with over 7.63 million channel subscribers and a monthly growth of 6.6 million subscribers, ranking it fifth globally on Telegram.
Gleb Kostarev and Vladimir Smerkis, former high-ranking executives at Binance, announced the establishment of Blum Exchange in March of this year. Kostarev previously served as the head of Binance in Eastern Europe, the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), Turkey, Australia, and New Zealand, while Smerkis was the regional general manager of the CIS. Additionally, Degenie, former design director at Binance and Trust Wallet, currently serves as Blum’s VP and is one of the co-founders.
According to official introductions, Blum is a decentralized exchange that provides token trading from both centralized and decentralized platforms, as well as simplified derivative trading. It has launched a mobile app and a mini app on Telegram. Blum will offer futures trading and the ability to purchase tokens from various networks. Furthermore, Blum does not hold user funds; users can create MPC wallets or connect existing wallets such as Ton Wallet, Trust Wallet, and Metamask.
In March of this year, Blum was selected for the seventh season of the Binance Labs MVB accelerator program. However, it should be noted that being selected for the program does not necessarily mean that Binance Labs will invest in the project. According to Bloomberg, Kostarev revealed in March that they were in negotiations for funding and hoped to complete the financing that month. As of now, Blum has not disclosed its funding situation.
Although Blum’s trading functionality is not yet live, it has already gained 10 million users through a game mining points system. Blum’s game mode consists of several parts.
Similar to the traditional airdrop process, users need to subscribe to official social media accounts or invite friends to earn points.
Blum has launched the Drop game, a game mode where users click on the screen to catch falling coins and earn points.
In the Farm mode, users do not need to deposit tokens but automatically earn points over time.
According to the official TG channel information, Blum is currently in the phase of collecting Blum points, which can be exchanged for tokens. On May 24th, Blum officially launched the Witch Report program. Reporters can receive a 1% point reward. To prevent excessive cheating, Blum currently limits each user to inviting only 10 friends to receive rewards. According to their official roadmap, they plan to open trading and self-custody wallets for public launch in the second quarter of 2024.
The recent success of the TON ecosystem’s click-screen games has been remarkable, with Hamster Kombat announcing on June 6th that it has surpassed 100 million users and has a daily active user base of 31 million. Tapswap announced that it has exceeded 30 million players. This has led many projects to see the explosive power of Telegram in quickly converting Web2 users. However, so far, the only project in the TON ecosystem that has succeeded in token economics through the game mode is Notcoin. Most players participating in these games hope to replicate Notcoin’s success.
From another perspective, several popular game projects have not yet launched token airdrop programs mainly due to the large number of users, resulting in minimal rewards for shared points. Additionally, many games did not set up a filtering mechanism for bots during the initial traffic acquisition process, leading to a significant number of bot accounts behind these numbers. Tapswap announced that it would delay the pool launch until July 1st, citing the reason as the discovery that many bots received unrealistic shares. Hamster Kombat announced on May 31st that it would release tokens on TON, but no specific time has been announced as of yet.
Currently, the TON public chain is reaping the benefits of the click-screen game frenzy. According to data from Tokenterminal, the TON chain currently has over 4.8 million monthly active users, with a monthly growth rate of 223%. This data was less than 500,000 before mid-March, and after the game frenzy sparked by Notcoin, the data has increased nearly tenfold in three months. The popular applications Hamster Kombat, tapswap, and Blum have yet to launch their airdrops. Once the airdrops are officially launched, it remains to be seen if there will be a significant drop in activity during the pre and post airdrop periods in the TON ecosystem.
This article is a collaboration and was originally published on DeepChain.