Activity on Hamster Kombat’s Layer 2 Network Plummets 99%

Activity on the Telegram-based Hamster Kombat game’s Layer 2 blockchain has dropped precipitously just two weeks after its launch.

On March 14, Hamster Network processed just 38,400 transactions in 24 hours compared to its launch date of Feb. 25, when it hosted a whopping 150 million transactions.

Consequently, the network’s throughput has fallen from a Solana-beating high of 34,028 transactions per second (TPS) to just 0.6 TPS, reflecting a huge fall-off in usage. Only 18 new accounts were created in the past 24 hours.

Those numbers showcase a massive decline of the once hugely popular “tap-to-earn” game, which claimed to have 140 million users last June. The team also claimed to have reached 100 million users faster than WhatsApp, Instagram and TikTok.

Built on The Open Network (TON) blockchain, Hamster Kombat is a Telegram game that claimed 300 million users in August, prior to its September airdrop. That number has reportedly dropped to 10.5 million, a 97% drop.

How long the game can persist as users continue to decline and usage drop off a cliff remains to be seen.

Hamster Kombat did not respond to The Defiant’s request for comment.

What about those numbers?

How accurate those massive Hamster Kombat numbers were is another story.

In June, Primitive Ventures founder Dovey Wan said that industrial farming was underway in preparation for a massive airdrop, suggesting that “tap-to-fake” would be a better name for it.

“Maybe it’s right to assume most consumer-facing dApps’ numbers are totally artificial when incentives are aligned with the dApps and professional farms,” she said.

Like a TON of bricks

Activity on the TON blockchain has also declined significantly following a big spike in August and September, during which daily transactions rose as high as 18.1 million. Currently, the network is processing roughly 2.2 million transactions per day.

The number of daily active wallets has also declined sharply since its Sept. 30 high of 1.8 million to the current 208,000.