Hamster Kombat hit by TON: Disappointment!

The Open Network (TON) overshadowed the Hamster Kombat airdrop due to systemic problems.

Telegram tap-to-win gamers got some exciting news this week. The developers of viral crypto game Hamster Kombat have announced that the HMSTR token launch will now take place on The Open Network (TON) on September 26, after being delayed in July.

However, the announcement was dampened by the news flow surrounding the TON ecosystem. This past weekend, Telegram co-founder and CEO Pavel Durov was arrested in France, leading to a price drop for TON and uncertainty surrounding the Telegram-affiliated network.

Before the Hamster Kombat announcement, TON had its network operations down for hours due to increased demand. The TON network recovered overnight, but crashed again the next day, crashing for several more hours.

TON’s core developers blamed this week’s network congestion and outages on demand for DOGS, a memecoin offered via an airdrop from the Telegram app. Despite the network issues, DOGS briefly entered the top 100 overall coins by market cap on Wednesday, reaching $1.8 billion in trading volume over the previous day.

The rise of The Open Network, which has been fueled by increased integration within Telegram over the past year and the success of Notcoin and subsequent crypto games, has driven more traffic to TON than ever before. On Friday, developers said on Telegram that the network had hit a new daily user record of 1.1 million.