In this interview with Weekend Trust, Uche Ikechukwu, a crypto expert and content creator spoke on what the tapping trend is all about and what Nigerians stand to gain from it.
Can you shed more light on what this new trend is all about?
Tapping and mining actually started with Notcoin, which was more like a telegram mini app and people signed up on the platform.
Since it was the first of its kind, nobody knew what was going to be the outcome, if it was going to do well or badly. There were no promises, but after a couple of months of tapping, they decided to give tokens to people that actually tapped and that was when a lot of persons made money from Notcoin.
Personally, I made about a thousand dollars from it and didn’t even stress. I didn’t even put in much work because if I had done, maybe I would have made like 5,000 dollars. Others made 20 dollars, some 50. That was for the 30 million subscribers they had.
Because of that trend, other projects adopted that telegram mini app because usually, it is very difficult to get 30 million users in crypto, except for some exchanges like Binance that has that volume of users.
But for a gaming platform to have so many followers, we had not seen such before. In six months, they (Notcoin) were able to get 30 million users.
This made founders adopt this kind of method to launch their own telegram mini app, then we had ‘Tapswap’, ‘Hamster Combat’ and several others.
Tapswap was quite popular, but after some time, Hamstar Kombat overtook it to become more popular. I actually think that Hamster Kombat rode on the impression that people heard of Notcoin, and that is why they got more users.
Hamstar Kombat, at the end of the day, had about 300 million users – people that were tapping on their platform. Because of that, people had a lot of expectations from the experience with Notcoin.
But you know, because of the large number of users, I had predicted that the coin was not going to do well. I said this because: let’s assume that they decide to give one dollar to each user, that’s almost $300 million; where are they going to get that money to give people.
Notcoin was able to do that because they had only 30 million users and not everyone made that much; just a few of us made up to $1,000.
Moreover, Notcoin had the backing of some of the biggest platforms; and I probably know that they had the money on their own for them to record that kind of feat.
After that, we also had the DOGS airdrop, and within two months after it came, it was able to give out airdrops, where I made about $480.
Before the DOGS airdrop, there was one called Pixel. But since they didn’t give airdrops, people got discouraged and didn’t join the DOGS, which turned out to do well because they had fewer users.
So because the last one did well, people mounted pressure on the next one, which was Hamster Combat, which was yet to launch its token at the time, and then, when they finally launched their token last week, a lot of persons were disappointed.
Are you saying that if not for the large number of subscribers, it would have worked?
Yes, the number actually prevented it from working. They said they gave the airdrop to 150 million people or so. I also think that because they did not allocate a lot of their tokens, they only gave about 67 per cent of their tokens to those who were tapping.
If they had given like 80 per cent of their token, I think they would have done well.
Looking at the resources, time and data that go into this, would you say people are losing or making money?
Well, it depends because not all of them are actually losing time and data. One thing for me is: Be specific on those ones that will do well. But if you don’t know the one that will do well, then it is going to be a long ride for you because you will be disappointed at the end of the day.
Can this be regarded as a job?
I am not sure it can be regarded as such because one thing with crypto is that trends actually pay off. So I guess that within the next few months, if we have a lot of them that are not doing well, the trend may die off and nobody will want to tap again. So, I do not see it as a soft job now or in the future.
Are there regulations?
There are no government regulations, so it is open to everyone that has a telegram account. You just abide by the telegram rules and you are good to go.
Do you think there is need for regulations?
Yes, there is need for that. I say this is because people did Pixel and did not make money from it at all.
We also had other ones that took money from people. Some founders are now capitalising on this trend to create fake platforms where they can take people’s money. They sometimes tell you to pay money to double your points, and at the end of the day, they will give you an airdrop not up to the amount you have actually spent.
How do people get paid; do they have to open dollar accounts?
They get paid via cryptocurrency. Let’s say the Hamster Kombat, for instance. After people finish the Hamster Kombat airdrop, they launch their token, which is in exchange for the game they have played so far on the platform. The token is the equivalent of what they actually get for what they have done so far and the amount of tokens given is going to reflect the total amount in dollars. So you get to see the rate in dollars.
Now, for you to get the money to your bank account, you will basically swap that money to dollars, and this is like the USDT, but this is the cryptocurrency version of US dollar(USD), which is backed by the dollar. So, one USDT is equal to one USD; just that one is owned by crypto and the USD by the government.
So, once you convert that to the USDT, you can go ahead and change that to naira, using the method called Peer-2-Peer (P2P), where you place an order to sell your USDT to someone that wants to buy from you, and the person credits your bank account. Once the credit has been confirmed, you can go ahead to release the USDT to the person.
What is your advice to people engage in it?
I can’t say people should rely on it because this is just 0.1 way of making money in crypto. There are several ways you can make money in crypto. I understand that these telegram mini apps made it easy to onboard people onto crypto, but there is more to crypto than tapping on your screen.
We were not tapping months or years back. So, I would implore people to focus on the skills around that will enable them to make money in crypto than just focusing on tapping. If you make money from tapping, good, but start thinking of other ways and start implementing it.
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