Unmet Expectations Spark Hamster Kombat Airdrop Outrage

Hamster Kombat is the latest web3 project to face backlash over an airdrop that failed to live up to community expectations.

On Sept. 26, Hamster Kombat, a popular tap-to-earn game on Telegram, conducted what was tipped to be the largest-ever web3 airdrop, with 131 million users qualifying to claim more than half of the HMSTR token’s supply.

However, with HMSTR now trading at a $452.7 million market cap after tumbling 44% within 24 hours of its launch, many users are complaining that their airdrop allocations equated to little more than "dust"— a term used to describe the trivial sums of cryptocurrency often left over from transactions.

“I’ve been playing Hamster Kombat for three months straight, hoping to finally get a decent reward,” Ritesh Kalvellu, a Hamster Kombat player, told The Defiant. “But all I got was $9 worth of HMSTR tokens. It’s really disappointing. I put in so much time and effort, and all we get is dust?”

Many users expressed similar sentiment on social media, reporting token allocations worth between $5 and $15.

“You gave me dust after 4 months,” Geoffrey Nwankpa tweeted. “I am killing hamsters, rats, rabbits, or anything that looks like a hamster. It’s hunting season.”

Hamster Kombat’s player base

Hamster Kombat claimed to have accrued an enormous user base of 300 million players since launching in late March. Just 43% of players qualified for the airdrop, with 2.3 million users also disqualified for suspected cheating.

On Sept. 26, Afik Rechler, the co-CEO of Chainstory, shared data indicating that the keyword “Hamster Kombat” receives 1.5 million monthly queries on Google. Users residing in just three countries account for 42% of the search traffic. India leads with 22% or 331,000 searches, Pakistan with 14% or with 213,000 searches, and Bangladesh with 6% or 102,000 searches.

Data from Google Trends shows the United States ranking 53rd among nations for “Hamster Kombat” search volume.

TON weathers HMSTR airdrop

The Open Network (TON), the Telegram-integrated Layer 1 network that hosted the airdrop, appears to have weathered the HMSTR airdrop without incident.

On Sept. 10, TON cautioned that its network might experience disruptions during the HMSTR airdrop, anticipating a massive surge in on-chain activity. The warning followed the recent seven-hour outage suffered by TON during the DOGS airdrop, with the drop estimated to have driven 150,000 token claims per minute on the network.

However, Ebi, a decentralized exchange supporting “off-chain airdrop deposits,” wasn’t so lucky.

On Sept. 26, Ebi announced delays in processing Hamster Kombat's airdrop claims due to overwhelming traffic. Ebi said it will distribute points to affected users as compensation.

Meanwhile, Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, appears to have benefited the most from the HMSTR drop. Binance’s hot wallet currently ranks as the second-largest address by TON holdings with nearly 18.2% of the token’s maximum supply, according to Tonviewer.

Binance Launchpool stakers received 3% of the token’s supply, while the exchange listed both spot and futures trading for HMSTR on Sept. 26.

Future plans

Looking ahead, Hamster Kombat plans to conduct a second airdrop in the future. The project also aims to launch a “dedicated advertising network” for games within the Hamster ecosystem in December 2024.

Hamster Kombat said revenue generated by the advertising network will be used to buy back HMSTR from the open market, with the tokens earmarked for both rewards distributions to players and a token burning program.