The viral growth of Hamster Kombat and its upcoming token launch on the TON blockchain could onboard hundreds of millions of people to Web3, according to Telegram founder Pavel Durov.
In a public post to his Telegram channel’s 2.7 million subscribers, Durov highlighted the viral clicker game’s booming success. Since its launch in March 2024, the game has attracted over 200 million players.
Durov noted some of Hamster Kombat’s eye-catching metrics, including taking just 73 days to reach 100 million monthly users. According to Telegram’s founder, the Telegram mini app has 4-5 million new users joining daily, making it one of the fastest-growing digital services in the world.
When will Hamster Kombat launch its token?
Durov also highlighted the implications of Hamster Kombat’s highly anticipated token airdrop, of which a date is yet to be confirmed. The project’s official roadmap on its website highlights that onchain infrastructure development and in-game wallet implementation were completed in June.
“Soon, Hamster’s team will mint its token on TON, introducing the benefits of blockchain to hundreds of millions of people. A new era is arriving, and we are witnessing its arrival in real-time,” Durov wrote.
While the team has not revealed any further details as to when it will officially launch its token, players have been able to link TON wallets in the game since June 2024.
Related: Hamster Kombat creators: marketing geniuses or modern satirists?
The game’s developers have also made numerous posts on Telegram, X and YouTube, highlighting that profit per hour is the most important metric for players to consider ahead of the highly-anticipated token airdrop.
Following Durov’s post about the game, Hamster Kombat announced that it had added a final level for players’ Hamster avatars to reach. ‘The Creator’ level requires users to have accrued 18 billion in-game coins.
Hamster Kombat’s Guinness World Records
As Cointelegraph previously explored in an in-depth feature, Hamster Kombat has hit several world record milestones as a result of its gaming and social mechanics.
The game features several ways for players to earn coins to upgrade their exchange and increase their profit per hour. One of these is links to its YouTube content, where players earn 100,000 coins for watching new content on its channel.
Related: Hamster Kombat destined for Guinness World Record?
Its YouTube page alone is outpacing Mr Beast's subscription numbers, the platform’s most subscribed-to channel globally.
Cointelegraph also revealed that the team has applied for a Guinness World Record as the first YouTube channel to gain over 10 million subscribers in one week (six days, 13 hours, and 15 minutes), among other subscriber-related milestones.
What is Hamster Kombat anyway?
Hamster Kombat has established itself as the most popular Telegram mini app in the idle game genre. The developers describe the game as a “crypto exchange CEO simulator” and not a “clicker” or “tapper” game.
The premise is simple. Players start out as a bald hamster who has signed a contract as the CEO of a cryptocurrency exchange. Users can tap the hamster avatar to generate in-game coins, but the core mechanic requires players to purchase exchange upgrades to improve their profit per hour.
Players can also earn coins for referring friends to play the game on Telegram, or by completing more difficult in-game tasks like solving a morse-code daily cipher linked to a secret word found in its daily YouTube videos, or buying a combination of three specific daily upgrades.
This has also become a means for content creators and websites to create daily videos and blog posts sharing the solutions. Daily ciphers reward 1 million coins, while the daily card combo gives users 5 million coins for upgrades.
Hamster Kombat as an income source?
The game’s success also raises some thought-provoking questions about the potential for Web3 games to become an alternative universal basic income (UBI) mechanism.
Players trade their time for in-game entertainment, but Hamster Kombat’s YouTube channel features daily news and cryptocurrency educational content that could serve as an introduction to core components of Web3 for newcomers to the ecosystem.
The project’s approach to social media growth hacking has resulted in staggering metrics. Hamster Kombat’s YouTube channel has gained 32 million subscribers since its launch on May 24. Its X profile has 11.3 million followers, and its official Telegram channel has 49.4 million subscribers.
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