Telegram game W-Coin has announced that its token launch on The Open Network (TON) is set for December, as an airdrop follows closely. However, the team won’t be receiving any tokens.

W-Coin’s anticipated token launch comes after some of the biggest games of the tap-to-earn craze debuted their tokens over the last few weeks, with Hamster Kombat and X Empire both holding their airdrops. After waiting out the hype cycle, the developers of W-Coin say they’re gearing up to roll out their own token.

On Thursday, W-Coin announced via Telegram that 70% of its token supply will be allocated to ‘mates,’ the name it has given players. The remaining 30% will be allocated to support project growth and centralized exchange listings as well as pay for marketing and future initiatives.

Notably, the post claims, there is no token allocation for the team.

“Keep tapping, stay engaged, and get ready,” the post said. “Our listing is just around the corner.” 

The tap-to-earn game took a “snapshot”—a term for recording on-chain data from a moment in time—that will correlate with players’ token allocations further down the line. This doesn’t mean players should stop playing the game, however, as in-game progress will continue to count towards the airdrop, presumably with another snapshot coming further down the line.

“The snapshot is here to ensure fair airdrop distribution based on true engagement, not just early access or balances,” the post said. “This is a big step toward the December listing, designed to reward real activity and set us apart from the rest.”

W-Coin has “about a month” left in this “mining phase,” the period that tap-to-earn games record in-game progress towards its airdrop. Once this period ends, the game’s developers will calculate the data and gear up for a December token listing.

Last month, the project confirmed that it will deploy the token on the most-used blockchain for Telegram games, The Open Network (TON). This was the result of a poll of 8.8 million players, with 68% voting for TON, while Solana finished in second with 24% and Ethereum with 8%.

Following its snapshot, W-Coin revealed that 7.7 million users have connected their wallets out of a total of nearly 37 million players, according to in-game data.

W-Coin follows in the footsteps of Hamster Kombat, the most popular Telegram game to date, which completed its airdrop in September. After amassing a player base of 300 million, the game finished its mining phase and revealed token allocations to players.

But once players received these tokens, many were left disappointed with the “dust” they received—the token’s price then dropped 50% in the weeks following the airdrop, and now is down by nearly 74%. Hamster Kombat’s second season was expected by the end of October, but has yet to launch as of this writing.

Notcoin is a more successful example, which saw its token’s market cap peak just shy of $3 billion. Since then, however, the project has had to reinvent itself multiple times to keep players interested, including helping to release a Flappy Bird Telegram game. And the NOT token has now plunged by about 78% since the peak.

For now, players don’t know the amount of tokens they’ll receive for the upcoming W-Coin airdrop, nor is pre-market trading available. Many other Telegram games have enabled pre-market trading ahead of the airdrop, letting traders speculate on a token’s potential price despite having very little information about it.

Edited by Andrew Hayward