Elon Musk-Themed Telegram Game ‘X Empire’ Opens Pre-Market Trading Ahead of Airdrop

X Empire, a rising Telegram tap-to-earn game, is following the Notcoin playbook, launching pre-market trading Tuesday through the use of custom NFT vouchers ahead of the upcoming token launch and airdrop.

While fellow Telegram games like Hamster Kombat and Catizen have rolled out pre-market trading through established exchanges, X Empire (originally Musk Empire) is instead letting players redeem an early share of their airdrop allotment by minting an NFT. Those NFTs, minted on The Open Network (TON), can then be traded on the Getgems marketplace.

It’s very similar to the approach earlier this year of Notcoin, the tap-to-earn game that set the mold for X Empire and other spiritual successors. Notcoin also previously let players cash out a share of their earned coins via NFT vouchers, which similarly were traded via Getgems, allowing traders to speculate on the future price of the NOT token.

There’s one key difference in the approaches, however. Because Notcoin’s gameplay was purely focused on the tap-to-earn design, the developers could provide a clear conversion rate, offering a single on-chain NOT token for every 1,000 in-game coins earned.

But the Elon Musk-themed X Empire has more gameplay elements, augmenting the basic tapping with the ability to enhance your avatar (a cartoonish Musk or otherwise) by spending in-game coins on upgrades, as well as betting on fake stocks or playing rock-paper-scissors negotiations with other players.

As such, it probably doesn’t make sense to base the airdrop purely on how many coins players have earned. However, the developers haven’t yet said how the airdrop allocations will be handled, so there are still a lot of question marks around the process—which could make it difficult for players to make a decision on whether to claim a voucher.

For example, this author’s high-level X Empire account says that I can mint two NFT vouchers, each equivalent to 69,000 on-chain tokens. But it will not represent the full amount of tokens that I’m ultimately able to claim. In other words, it’s all a bit confusing for now.

Decrypt’s GG reached out to the developers for clarification on the airdrop allocations and how they pertain to the NFT vouchers, but did not immediately receive a response.

Minting NFT vouchers is completely optional for players; they can choose to wait until the actual airdrop instead, and just claim their tokens then. The process of minting an NFT requires paying network gas fees on TON, plus the developers of X Empire are taking a 20% royalty fee from all secondary market trades.

Alongside the vouchers launch, X Empire announced that the token will be called X—just like the new name for Elon Musk’s Twitter—and that the token is planned to have a total supply of 690 billion tokens on TON.

The first X Empire voucher NFTs are starting to show up on the Getgems marketplace, but only one has sold as of this writing: It went for 7 TON, or about $36 worth.

X Empire announced recently that it will end its mining phase on September 30, and that the token airdrop will be offered to players soon after. For more details on X Empire and what to expect from the token launch and airdrop, read our guide to the game.