Proof-of-Crowd: From MTV to Notcoin
How does culture and community itself create a trend in technology?
In 2025, we're not flying hoverboards or tying our shoelaces at the touch of a button, but we've created prototypes of the future that have grown out of simple human experiences.
Imagine three people sitting around a table: an engineer, a marketer and an ordinary but inspired user.
The engineer insists: "We have to build the technology!"
The marketer objects, "Without users, it's useless."
The user shrugs: "I actually have to be interested.”
What if you could build in reverse - community first, then value, then the technology itself? That's proof-of-crowd - the mechanism that has turned music, movies, games and even blockchain on its head.
We frame this theory with a △ triangle: three fulcrums - technology, application (value), emotion - create valid sustainability.
In culture and society, triplicity is a basic structure that spreads the load evenly. The Proof-of-Crowd concept is our theoretical metaphor: success comes from crowd activity, not just code or ideas. This reflects phenomena where narrative, technology and community work together to create value - the basis of the 'triple perception' theory.
With this approach, even a project with nine blank pages’ whitepaper can become something big if the crowd believes in it.
And this isn't fantasy - we've seen it work over the last 50 years, from cultural revolutions to the digital age. No Illuminati, seriously - just facts and reasoning.
Crowd theory
Proof-of-Crowd has a very interesting origin and relationship with the theory and book of the same name, Wisdom of Crowds, just looking at the concept of the crowd effect not only in psychology, but also in pop culture, psychology, biology, behavioural economics and other fields.
POC itself is a direct extension of this idea in relation to Web3
General questions answered by the article
Why are culture and technology inseparable?
How does the crowd transform technology into culture and value?
How does Notcoin reflect a future created by the crowd?
How has the role of community evolved from passive consumption to active creation?
What's in Notcoin for you, crowd?
Launched in November 2023 as a closed beta, the project with the simplest mechanics for Web3 was not only able to gain a quick start-up popularity of 650,000 users in the first weeks, but also to maintain it in the "greedy growth" phase, where 5 million users turned into the current base of over 35 million viewers worldwide.
The △ of technology, application and social perception is no longer new to the Web3 community, but in reality many ignore the importance of balancing all the verticals when creating a mass product with the ability to scale to a mass audience.
Society = a constant without which no idea or technology can exist regardless of the trend of it.
In the era of spontaneous shifts in market sentiment, $NOT and the shadow ecosystem behind it, Notcoin, along with its backing in the form of its parent blockchain, TON Network, is seen by many as a passing fad by airdrop hunters, traders and other risk-taking public.
But what if behind the inverted △ is the verified statistics and experience of previous playmakers? Let's go through the key factors that make up this project in the prism of social perception.
For most, NOT is just a sideline in everyday messaging, a Telegram game with no global subtext. For some, NOT is a web application at all: a dry token graph spiced with news analysis. But there is a unity to all parts of this artefact:
We see direct proof that a crowd armed with an idea and technology can create reality itself.
Once upon a time, MTV gave the world a spectacle by showing that music could have a face, and today Notcoin not only gives its audience a real Harry Houdini show, but also the chance to pull a rabbit out of a hat themselves!
But about all that. In this article we will try to show how the project has become a mirror of our era - from the echoes of the past to the magic we are writing together. 🎩🐇
Why culture and technology are inextricably linked
Thousands of years ago, early humans drew scenes of domestic life, hunting or the first stirrings of 'chronicles', passing on stories through symbols and drawings on the rocks of their caves. Today we do the same - only instead of coal, rocks and caves, we have pixels and social media.
Memes are the same cave paintings, easy to understand and hard to forget. In the Web3 era, the value of a community is often built not on code, but on memes, legends and shared culture.
But why are we suddenly talking about memes?
Given the clear relationship between memes and culture, it's also worth mentioning a new phenomenon of the digital age: marketing. ‘Without users, technology is not interesting’ shouted the marketer at the aforementioned table.
And there is truth in his words: no innovator could have changed the world if his advertising department [or he himself in its role, author's note] had not been able to instil in the audience the importance and promise of his product.
Increasingly, marketing these days is becoming like a local 4chan forum thread:
One person sets a tone of voice with a ‘viral’ picture or video about his product, and thousands echo him in the same style.
And in this type of marketing, the technical basis is not important - you can 'sell a pen' even if all you have is a pile of sketches, drafts and preliminary ideas.
Or probably, 'nothing'?
Memecoins are one of the fundamental structures of TON, The Open Network. No different from their non-financial predecessors, memcoins directly reflect the essence of social consensus: as a consequence of openness and free narrative.
Looking at dexscreener, most tokens - apart from those that attract investors because of their technical innovation or political/news hype - have narrative, even cult-like overtones.
This may sound romantic, but the controlled chaos of memecoins suits most Web3 audiences better than the unmanaged stability of altcoins.
Controlled chaos of cult coins?
When it comes to the main social narrative of the Web3 in 2025, one cannot simply go without mentioning the opinions of key players in the memecoin sector, e.g. @MuradNotMurad and @blknoiz06 (Ansem).
Speaking in September 2024 at the TOKEN2049 conference in Singapore with a keynote speech on "The Memecoin Supercycle", Murad called the real coins in it those - that will be able to organise real tokenised communities using memes as symbols of their mini-religions.
And this “religion” and belonging to a certain community is not determined by the size of the bag of coins purchased / grown.
It emerges precisely because of force-culture and the desire for digital freedom
One truth is clearly discernible among Murad's words: beyond suggesting the rise of certain cults, he clearly outlines a theory of closure to the problem of social engagement - a product, no matter its nature, should encompass the most personal and individual feelings of its audience.
What's most interesting is that if you replace the word ‘meme-coin’ in these posts with any other viral and trending narrative, this thought has the same potential.
The same idea is confirmed by @blknoiz06 (Ansem) in one of his X discussions: ‘is why they dont need to exist as coins already bc there are internet meme cults that just aren't memecoins yet’
But now we're talking about memecoins. What does that have to do with Notcoin?
Take a look at the Dexscreener by TON Network category. At the top of the list in recent days is a coin whose thesis, taken up by the public, is the creation of a 'fictitious bank' with the absurd slogan:
'The first and only bank that promises to do nothing'.
We are not interested in the coin itself or the moment of its appearance, but in the reasons for its promotion among the masses. Why did the public take up the idea?
At first glance it seems to be just another internet joke. But for some reason, when you look at the community of this coin, you notice a pattern that relates to a more global aspect of Web3.
The epicentre lies in this topic of the day.
As we said, the digital freedom sought by the Web3 cult community depends on the narrative chosen by the product. However, around 95% of the 'free-floating' coins don't carry more than the idea of that very freedom.
This includes the local “bank” created by an influencer's joke.
We already have mechanisms for real digital freedom - and that's Notcoin.
$NOT was also a memcoin with a similarly “rebellious” effect. But why exactly did it make the TON network not only the largest blockchain in terms of unique wallets, but also open the gates to virtually any gamification of the blockchain experience?
Where do the numbers on the charts come from?
Notcoin has gone further than a joke bank. Taking advantage of the ideology of the entire cryptocurrency world, which started with $BTC digital gold, the Open Builders team realised the perfect case for the simplest way to connect audiences to the basics of blockchain: by gradually gamifying the main branches of activity.
How much time it is to become a crypto person, when you really understand how blockchain works? (c) Sasha Plotvinov, CEO Open Builders
It takes the average user several years to understand the basics of blockchain, whereas thanks to Notcoin, this perception has been accelerated to a few months of familiarisation. Trade, stake, earn, participate in GameFi, vote and much more - on your smartphone screen.
Would you agree that the effect is greater than that of a common meme?
Culture and technology are an inseparable duo that only comes to life in the hands of the crowd. This is proven by the ‘source → force → growth’ triangle, where a simple idea turns into value through the enthusiasm of the community.
Notcoin started with ‘tap and earn’, a technology available to everyone.
Force came through thousands of memes, ‘Nothing’ jokes and the ideology of the inverted token TON (NOT), creating a culture of blockchain simplicity. The growth? From 650,000 users in November 2023 to 35+ million by 2025 - it's not just a trend, it's a movement that has made $NOT a symbol of digital freedom.
And the ecosystem is trying to live up to it - capturing more trending and most importantly useful use cases... for the topic of the day 😉
It's important to realise - that Notcoin's peak impact will not come from a specific mini-App in their ecosystem, or from burning another batch of tokens. This narrative is a global shift in the ideology of engaging people in technology through simplicity.
This is the main power of the Proof-of-Crowd triplet: you can make a phenomenon out of any idea if you create virality, freedom and usefulness of the technology. Like, for example - it was done by... MTV?
When music found a face: the video killed the radio star
Now that Youtube, Tiktok and other social networks have become mainstream, meme culture has flourished, and the effectiveness of 'social marketing' is no longer a surprise.
But what came before the zoo video?
You remember MTV, right? Music Television is an American cable and satellite television channel owned by Paramount Global, a division of Paramount Media Networks.
Before MTV, music was pure sound. Artist and audience, records and radio. We knew our favourite songs, but we didn't always know the faces. Sometimes it worked in favour: bands like Led Zeppelin had an aura of mystery because you didn't see them every day. But there was something missing.
Everything changes on 1 August 1981, when the phrase ‘Ladies and gentlemen, rock and roll’ opens the channel broadcast by The Buggles . The video clip becomes a new language: sound, image, story. The three elements are now inseparable.
But what was truly born that day?
One of the most popular modern examples of Proof-of-Crowd:
Music —foundation, the technology of sound
Видео — usefulness, visual engagement
Исполнитель — Narrative, face and story that bring people together
The world saw Michael Jackson turn into a werewolf in Thriller, and A-ha burst out of a comic book in Take on Me. Music is now a show. Every video has become more than a simple composition:
It has become culture and fashion, protest and history.
Imagine the look on the faces of those parents whose children were playing punk rock in garages, wearing colourful bandanas and pretending to play guitars and drums. They dreamed of becoming rock musicians, while their relatives dreamed of the silence that disappeared in an instant 😈
A revolution in perception, in which the unification of trends created a mass phenomenon: the culture of presence became not only a new icon, an image that one wanted to live up to. It became simpler: if you see your idol doing it, you can do it too.
But what basis, then, did MTV give for Notcoin?
Obviously, talking about events 44 years apart literally is not a good idea.
And the issue here is really one with a perennial catch: our Proof-of-Crowd builds in the subsequent scaling that created a digital domino effect: the virality of MTV helped to actually simplify the perception of the image of the ‘music author’.
MTV, launched on 1 August 1981, was a revolutionary channel for promoting music through music videos, which greatly increased the number of new musicians gaining recognition. - about 2-fold, according to numerous top/charts of those years.
Can't call this an example of Notcoin? - Look at the developers of TON Network!
Thanks to the palm tree, Open Builders was able to show not only their community but also developers that creating mass appeal and interest with a simple method is indeed possible.
The simplest clicker was the first of hundreds that appeared on Telegram. Thanks to "probably nothing", instead of simple grant systems, developers were able to realise the most unusual ideas of applications and initiatives, supported not only by Notcoin itself, but also by its partners and even by the TON network itself.
Building on TON is easier than learning Solidity. We've tested 😟
All that matters is the idea, the technology and the cultural echo. And this was happening 40 years ago. And not just in music.
Harry Potter and narratives of triplicity
It's an unexpected twist, isn't it?
The love triangles of tabloid fiction, the battle between good, evil and a few grey Jedi, and other examples of narrative triplicity have been familiar to us since childhood.
Literature has steadily consolidated the existence of a 'unifying' trio, thanks to which all of us have at one time or another found resonance in one hero or another: someone in a vampire, someone in a werewolf and someone in a monster hunter. 🪓
But this time we're going to add a pinch of magic to the narrative: Joanne Rowling has managed to give the text the most memorable example of proof-of-crowd in literature:
Hermione Granger, as the magical ‘technologist’ and brain of the team. Harry Potter, bravely putting into practice the results of the ‘brain of the team’ work, and, of course, Ron Weasley, the resonator of emotions and involvement of the whole trio.
For the more advanced Potter-fans: Hermione is the Elder Wand, Harry Potter is the Invisibility Cloak and Ron is the Resurrection Stone. Why the remark?
Simply because one of the authors of this article wants to argue with the reader, and arguing breeds cultural engagement. 😉
Back to the reasoning.
Try to exclude at least one member of the trio from the narrative:
Book 7, Harry and Ron's quarrel: without Ron, Harry loses his initiative and leadership skills, and Hermione becomes emotionally repressed.
Book 2, Hermione's trauma: without her, Harry becomes more impulsive and risk-taking. Ron, though loyal to his remaining friend, doesn't have the same insight.
We cannot help but draw an analogy with Proof-of-Crowd:
If you take away the technology, everything will work, but not to its full potential. If you take away the application, the product will remain a local idea. If you take away the community, it simply won't be useful to anyone 🙂
If, for whatever reason, you're far from the literary fantasy genre, or just don't find Notcoin resonating on paper, we can tell you about another Proof-of-Crowd grey horse - the successor to fantasy games, the computer RPG.
Zelda and MMORPGs - Is this how the first blockchain was born?
Each cultural sphere of today's generations can be perceived in its own way: battles between fans of the book and screen versions of any story are not uncommon on the fields of 'digital' battles.
But the essence of being human is to be in motion, and thus (in most cases) to be in the thick of things. And that applies to any story that engages users. When MTV showed that a musician is not an abstract genius in a studio on Mars, but a real person whose style, habits and, most importantly, ideology can be adopted, thousands of teenagers picked up their favourite musical instrument and saw how cool it was:
To be like their favourite star.
And even before music videos, stars were born: inspiration was not lost, and experience was still learnt from one generation to the next. But thanks to the viral spread of pop culture, the ‘pipeline’ of stars has become broader and more diverse.
People wanted to be part of that culture, they took a microphone, a camera and got on stage.
Is it the same with games?
The games industry, which at the time was just moving away from Tetris, snakes and ping-pong, was one of the biggest prisms through which new stories were created, from paper to screen.
While children wanted to be princesses and mighty warrior-knights, their parents wanted to be wise wizards and dragons. The fantasy works already imposed a new experience of immersion in history: the first, though niche, board games like Dungeons & Dragons appeared (the RPG genre was born), dozens of interesting stories were shown in the cinema.
But the golden mean was video games - combining story, visuals and the opportunity to participate in the process of becoming the hero (or heroine) of a favourite story.
Games like The Legend of Zelda offered the player non-linear gameplay, open world and a deep story, allowing them to immerse themselves in the role of a fantasy character with as much of the ‘presence’ of those days as possible.
According to the game's creator, Shigeru Miyamoto, he wanted to recreate in video game form the same sense of awe and excitement he felt when exploring forests and caves in his youth - to imagine the joy of discovery or the fear of getting lost in a maze.
In the same piece, the implications of The Legend of Zelda's success as ‘the greatest video game of all time’ - 6.5 million copies sold - and the groundwork laid for future RPG genre forwards like Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy are clearly evident.
An immersive journey into an unknown world through simple and familiar mechanics. Still not ringing a bell?
Zelda's influence on the social side of things can't be underestimated either: if board games have brought together gated communities of dungeon geeks for 10-hour gaming sessions in the basements of American homes, what about the impending typhoon of RPGs?
On the one hand, most of us are familiar, at least by ear, with RPG festivals, cosplay and themed forums; they still exist. But in the prism of our conversations about MTV, this kind of community activity still tends to be referred to as 'concerts', nice but more localised events.
Zelda for many years built a common story and rules of the world in which all the characters were prescribed, but people wanted to make their own adventure. From these thoughts came the idea of the first MMO, namely Ultima, in which there was complete freedom of action and the whole plot was based on the users themselves.
The driving force - was the emergence of MMOs / MMORPGs.
massively multiplayer online role-playing game
Projects such as Ultima Online [1997] and World of Warcraft [2004], as well as dozens of their contemporaries, have been able to scale the idea of immersing the player in their favourite story, literally - to the size of the real world.
These games allowed players to be whatever they wanted to be - warriors, thieves or merchants, to form guilds and share adventures. This multiplied the effect of presence itself, creating not only a platform for gaining and internalising a collective experience where success depended on collaborative effort.
This, in fact, laid the groundwork for the practice to be applied universally.
Note
The triplicity of narrative has flowed seamlessly into the format of games:
Tank <> Support <> Damager in MMORPGs is the canonical pro-image of a strong group of players.
The trio of player <> companion-guide <> game world is used for a deeper but at the same time simplified immersion into the game world.
Allegories of light <> darkness <> borderland, life-death-reincarnation and other literary mechanics are used for familiar immersion in new worlds.
At this stage, the Proof-of-Crowd format ceases to be a localised ‘phenomenon-creation’ effect, as against the backdrop of digital guilds, clans and friends lists, we gain a global immersion of people in digital freedom of action.
Given that MMORPGs have almost always had an underlying digital economy behind them - you could say that Zelda provided the inspiration for the first formation of the blockchain idea.
Unfortunately, we'll never know the truth about whether Satoshi Nakomoto was a level-80 elf or preferred to play for darker races - but the fact that the 'fork economy' is similar online suggests that the Bitcoin creator was at least aware of the concept.
Subsequently, the ‘fork economy’ format itself has been applied almost universally in the gaming industry, from the balance top-ups of large game aggregators, to the trading [often semi-decentralised, author's note] of rare skins, weapons, armour and other in-game loot.
Bringing you back to the present for a little while
Notcoin was no exception: the monetised stickers alone are worth something, as well as collaborations with the huge ecosystem of Telegram Mini-Apps. The shadow economy between projects became so large that the mere mention of Notcoin in a project was enough - to give value to tokens not yet released on OTC and Pre-Markets
The biggest successors to MMORPGs are Asian gacha games such as Tower of Fantasy and Genshin Impact, which brought us back to handhelds: the immersive effect of the game was combined with the mechanic of randomly sending characters on journeys.
The gacha phenomenon is written about in university dissertations, seriously!
Research also shows that gacha games and MMORPGs create strong communities through shared goals and collectibles. Many players have switched from classic MMORPGs to Gacha games due to lifestyle changes, finding them a more manageable format with a similar sense of progression and community.
In addition to the games themselves, the basis of social communication has also changed - platforms such as Discord have become key in retaining players through feedback and promoting communities inside and outside of the game projects themselves.
The prototype of blockchain, NFT and socialisation? Is the story really that far cycled?
Isn't it? Think of any successful MMORPG - it's almost the prototype of Web3. These games had their own economies where rare items were worth hundreds and thousands of dollars, they had their own DAOs in the form of guilds that made collective decisions, and there was powerful socialisation - raids, alliances, PVP and even in-game weddings.
NFTs are the same unique items with real value. Blockchain is a decentralised server that no one can shut down or raid. And Web3 socialisation is what used to happen in World of Warcraft chat or Lineage 2 trading zones.
Notcoin simply took the next logical step. It took the familiar mechanics of mass games, added Web3 technology and transferred it to a platform that already has a huge community - Telegram. And what was the result? A massive MMO where clicks are grind, Squads are guilds, and memes and community are the driving force that creates value.
The story is really cyclical. We just take old ideas, add new technology, and watch them blow up the culture again.
Creativity is just connecting things
Homo Sapiens, we differ in an interesting way from animals and aliens from Alpha Centauri [not proven, author's note]. In the context of cultural evolution, when we learn new things - we always want to be part of it.
When it comes to being a part of something big, changing the historical fundamentals both locally and globally: it doesn't matter if you want to try on lats, learn how to pick up chords, or understand the basics of gas fees and crypto trading.
What matters is being part of a culture, being sick of that culture and infecting others with that culture. And when you combine that with ease of use and technology 'for everyone' - the effect is massive.
Proof-of-Crowd is metaphorical proof of this perspective: if the world gives us the opportunity and inspiration to participate directly, most of us will want to pick up a guitar or a black steel two-handed sword.
And the same principle proves that it can be applied to any area of behavioural psychology - including the gathering storm of blockchain innovation.
We are the community, and our skills and ideas are the tools of the future.
While Satoshi Nakamoto created BTC to compete with the entire global economy and consolidate an engaged community around a crypto-punk motif, Open Builders are creating 'nothing' in an entirely new - but global - niche.
Idea culture - already was
Idea blockchain - already exists
Idea coins - present.
So why not add an ideational global ecosystem to this list?
Or is this whole vision just the fantasy world of the authors of this article? △
Burn!!!
Split mc in half...