Is Hamster Kombat Onboarding the Masses Into DeFi?

It’s a wrap, crypto people, we have gone mainstream at last! Or that’s what a superficial look at Hamster Kombat numbers would have you think.

The so-called “tap-to-earn” game built on Telegram’s blockchain TON, says it has nearly 150 million total users interacting with its game. Not only that, but the team says it reached 100 million users faster than WhatsApp, Instagram, and TikTok.

It also claims to have over 20 million YouTube subscribers and 36 million Telegram subscribers.

While the quick ascent of the Hamster Komba social media accounts and active users is unprecedented, it's also likely to be deceiving.

Founder of Primitive Ventures, Dovey Wan, said Hamster Komnbat’s growth is driven by “industrial farming” and said rather than “tap-to-earn,” the dApp’s gaming model should be called “tap-to-fake.”

“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.

Hamster Kombat’s inflated numbers are a reminder that dApp and blockchain usage numbers shouldn’t be taken at face value, especially when projects are implementing incentives that may drive users to create multiple accounts and interact just to collect rewards.

Hamster Kombat did not reply to a request for comment.

Made possible by mini-apps on Telegram, click-to-earn games have quickly gained users after the success of Notcoin.

Notcoin popularized the genre following its launch on May 16 at a market capitalization of roughly $700 million before surging to a high of $2.6 billion on June 4.

Airdrop farmers have rushed towards the opportunity, leading to a surge in active wallet addresses on TON since May 17. TON’s daily active addresses even flipped Ethereum’s on June 1, with Tonstat reporting 455,000 active TON addresses compared to 434,000 active ETH addresses reported by Etherscan.

Hamster Kombat Airdrop

Hamster Kombat, in particular, is drawing attention due to its growth on social media and its upcoming token generation event (TGE) in July.

The game and its data are currently held off-chain. Users can sign up to play by joining the game channel on their telegram app and tapping a hamster to collect coins. The focus of the game is to collect as many coins as possible and then use them to generate more coins prior to the TGE.

Within the game, users can tap to earn, level up their account, mine coins, refer their friends for bonuses and eventually claim their on-chain tokens by connecting a TON-compatible wallet.