Former Binance executive launches new exchange?
Recently, there has been a surge in popularity for click-screen games in the TON ecosystem. In addition to Notcoin, games like Hamster Kombat and tapswap have also surpassed 30 million users. Among the top 10 channels on Telegram globally, five are now cryptocurrency community channels.
One of the rapidly rising communities is Blum, which currently has over 7.63 million channel subscribers and has gained 6.6 million subscribers in a single month, ranking it fifth globally on Telegram.
Blum was founded by former high-ranking Binance executives and was selected for the Binance Labs accelerator program. In March of this year, Gleb Kostarev and Vladimir Smerkis announced the establishment of Blum Exchange. Kostarev previously served as the Head of Binance for Eastern Europe, the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), Turkey, Australia, and New Zealand, while Smerkis was the Regional General Manager for the CIS. Additionally, Degenie, the former design lead for Binance and Trust Wallet, currently serves as Blum’s VP and is one of the co-founders.
According to the official introduction, Blum is a decentralized exchange that offers token trading from both centralized and decentralized platforms, as well as simplified derivative trading. They have launched a mobile application and a mini application within Telegram. Blum will provide futures trading and the ability to purchase tokens from various networks. Furthermore, Blum does not hold user funds; users can create an MPC wallet or connect existing wallets such as Ton Wallet, Trust Wallet, Metamask, etc.
In March of this year, Blum was selected for the seventh season of the Binance Labs MVB accelerator program, although it is understood that being selected for the program does not guarantee investment from Binance Labs. According to Bloomberg, Kostarev revealed in March that they were in negotiations for financing and hoped to complete it that month. As of now, Blum has not disclosed its financing situation.
Exchange with millions of users that can only play games
Currently, Blum’s trading function has not yet been launched, but it has already gained 10 million users through a mining points system in its games. Blum’s game mode is divided into several parts.
1. Similar to the traditional airdrop process, users need to subscribe to official social media accounts or invite friends to earn points.
2. Blum has launched the Drop game, where users earn points by clicking on the screen to catch falling coins.
3. Farm mode, in which users do not need to deposit tokens but automatically earn points over time.
According to the official Telegram 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 Reporting Program, where reporters can receive a 1% point reward. Perhaps to limit the number of witches using cheating methods to recruit members, Blum currently restricts each user to invite only 10 friends to receive rewards. According to their official roadmap, trading and self-custodial wallets will be open in the second quarter of 2024 for the Public Launch.
Game airdrops face difficulties, TON emerges as the biggest winner
TON’s ecosystem of small games has recently achieved exaggerated results, with Hamster Kombat announcing on June 6th that they have surpassed 100 million users and have a daily active user count of 31 million, while tapswap announced that they have over 30 million players. This has also allowed many projects to see the explosive power of Telegram in quickly converting Web2 users. However, so far, the only project in the TON ecosystem to successfully monetize through the game mode is Notcoin, and most of the players who participate are hoping that the new rising games can replicate Notcoin’s success.
From another perspective, several popular game projects have yet to launch token airdrop programs, mainly because the user base is too large, resulting in minimal rewards when points are distributed. Additionally, many games did not set up filters to detect bots during the initial phase of gaining traffic, which resulted in a large number of bot accounts behind these user data. tapswap announced a delay in the pool launch until July 1st, explaining that the reason for the delay is mainly due to the discovery that many bots have received unrealistic shares. Hamster Kombat announced on May 31st that they would release tokens on TON, but no specific time has been announced so far.
Currently, TON’s public chain is reaping the benefits of the small game frenzy. According to data from tokenterminal, TON’s chain currently has over 4.8 million monthly active users, with a monthly growth rate of 223%. This data was less than 500,000 in mid-March and has increased nearly tenfold in the three months since the game frenzy sparked by Notcoin. The popular applications Hamster Kombat, tapswap, and Blum have yet to launch their airdrops. Once the airdrops are officially implemented, it remains to be seen whether the previous decline in activity during the airdrop period will occur in the TON ecosystem.
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