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Recently, Binance Labs announced its investment in Pluto, the parent company behind the Telegram mini-game Catizen. As one of the most popular mini-games in the Telegram ecosystem, Catizen will also launch a token in the near future. This article will give readers a comprehensive introduction to the development of Catizen and talk about the future development of Telegram and TON ecosystems inspired by Catizen.
Catizen Basic Information
1. What is Catizen?
Catizen is a super casual cat-raising game in the Telegram ecosystem. Its slogan is "Play for Airdrop". The game was officially launched in March 2024 and had more than 1 million players in the first week of public beta. As of July 29, according to official data, the total number of players exceeded 26.95 million, with 1.47 million daily active users, 1.61 million on-chain users, 20.74 million on-chain transactions, 2.01 million Twitter followers, and 5.25 million channel subscribers.
Catizen has completed three rounds of financing. Its latest round of investment was invested by Binance Labs.
2. Gameplay
Catizen is a super casual game with relatively simple gameplay. Players will play the role of a cat cafe owner and can manage up to 12 cats of different levels at the same time. Every 2 cats of the same level can be synthesized into a higher level cat. Cats can produce tokens. As the cat level increases, more tokens can be produced per second. Tokens can be used to purchase high-level cats directly in the store to speed up the game progress. In addition to the normal game content, Catizen also incorporates many social fission factors, such as inviting new users to get diamonds, exchanging diamonds for cash, etc.
In general, the gameplay of Catizen is very similar to the popular "Cute Dog Transformation" in the WeChat mini-game ecosystem in 2018. The goal of the player is to continuously synthesize cats and then obtain higher-level cats to gain a sense of accomplishment, the joy of cultivation, and potential airdrops. However, compared with Cute Dog Transformation, Catizen is still relatively monotonous except for the core gameplay.
3. Economic Model
Currently, there are four in-game non-tradable tokens in the Catizen ecosystem, namely vKITTY, Fish, xZEN and $wCATI. The overall token economy has not been fully disclosed.
It is currently known that CATI will be listed on the exchange and is a tradable token; vKITTY and Fish are functional tokens in the game. The output speed of vKITTY is an indicator to measure the progress of the game. According to the official public vKITTY in July, users with high output speed will be given priority for airdrops; Fish is a practical token in the game, which can indirectly increase the output speed of vKITTY by consuming Fish, and the only way to obtain Fish is to recharge (in addition to completing novice tasks).
It can be seen that the entire Catizen token economic system determines that if users want to obtain a higher airdrop ratio, they must do so by spending money, and cannot simply add multiple accounts without spending any money. Because for players who don’t spend any money, there is a limit to the capacity increase of vKITTY. In the end, for players whose vKITTY capacity does not meet the standard, it is extremely likely that there will be no airdrops or very few airdrops.
4. Data Performance
The following data about Catizen is mainly sourced from official disclosures at different times and is for reference only.
As of July 29, according to official data, the total number of players exceeded 26.95 million, with 1.47 million daily active users, 1.61 million on-chain users, 20.74 million on-chain transactions, 2.01 million Twitter followers, and 5.25 million channel subscribers.
Catizen was officially launched in March 2024. Ten weeks after its launch, the total number of registered users exceeded 10 million, with more than 2 million daily active users and 400,000 paying users. The cumulative on-chain revenue exceeded US$11 million, and nearly 80% of the revenue came from $TON.
As a hyper-casual game, the payment rate is usually low. However, Catizen has achieved a payment conversion rate of nearly 4% relying solely on in-game purchases, providing $25 in revenue for each paying user and $1.1 in revenue for each user. Even if Catizen's data is placed in the traditional overseas hyper-casual game field, it is still considered an outstanding performance.
5. Future Roadmap
2024 Q1 launch (completed): game Laucnch, using the Play-to-earn Airdrop Model (doubtful)
2024 Q2 Token Launch (Postponed): Listing on major exchanges, airdrop for early users and supporters
2024 Q3 Platformization: Introduce a game platform economy with token staking and lock-up, where NFTs and airdrops of new games can be obtained through token staking; introduce a game revenue sharing mechanism
2024 Q4 Innovation: Introduce AI and AR versions, introduce traditional gamers through cooperation
2025 Q1 Game and platform optimization: Increase user base and optimize platform mechanism
2025 Q2 Innovative feature optimization: Introducing new features for AI and AR versions
2026 Q3 Cat Universe: Start developing Cat Universe
According to Catizen's plan, Catizen has completed the first phase of the cold start period, acquired a large number of users, and is transitioning to a token-based LaunchPool.
6. Development Team
Pluto, the development team behind the Catizen game, has rich experience in game development and operation, and has prepared enough reserves of mini-games to enable it to continue launching new products after Catizen. Currently, its official website shows that there are 38 mini-games waiting to be Web3-based.
Thoughts on Catizen and TON Ecosystem
After an in-depth study of Catizen, we have the following thoughts and predictions about the TON ecosystem:
Tokens
According to the latest official white paper, the economic model of Catizen's governance token $CATI is as follows, where the portion belonging to the team, seed round investors and advisors will be unlocked linearly 12 months after TGE, and the total release is expected to be completed in 4 years (30% of the total amount). $CATI is currently available for trading on Bybit's Pre-Market. As of August 1, the latest transaction price is 0.7U, corresponding to FDV of 700 million US dollars; and the current fully circulated $NOT has an FDV of 1.35 billion US dollars.
It is worth mentioning that Catizen is not the first game launched by the Pluto team on TON. As early as 2023, the Pluto team transplanted its earliest game called Tap Fantasy, which was operated in the BSC ecosystem, to the TON ecosystem and issued coins. Currently, the FDV of Tap Fantasy's token Magic Crystal ($MC) is $16.48M.
Opportunities of TON ecosystem: large growth space, mass adoption foundation, and payment capability
(1) The TON ecosystem has a huge user base, and the on-chain activity still has a lot of room for growth
Since January 2024, the number of active addresses on the TON ecosystem chain has continued to grow, and has now reached a new high of around 450K daily active users, surpassing Ethereum's on-chain daily active users (around 400K). TON's on-chain daily active user performance is similar to that of highly active L2s such as Arbitrum and Base.
We can infer the activity ceiling of the TON ecosystem from the development of the WeChat mini-game ecosystem. Currently, WeChat's monthly active users are around 1.3 billion, and the number of active users of WeChat mini-games has reached 750 million. The monthly active users of the most popular mini-games have exceeded 100 million, accounting for 8% of WeChat's monthly active users. Telegram currently has around 900 million monthly active users. If we compare it with the conversion rate of WeChat mini-games, we have reason to expect the emergence of mini-game products with monthly active users exceeding 70 million in the Telegram ecosystem. If we infer based on Catizen's 10% on-chain user conversion rate, the on-chain monthly active users of the TON ecosystem still have at least several times of growth space. Currently, only Solana has achieved more than one million active addresses on the chain. TON is the next public chain with this potential.
(2) The TON ecosystem provides “channel” support and can provide high conversion rates
In fact, the narrative of reducing the profit margins of middlemen through Crypto has a long history, but before TON, this narrative has never been implemented. There may be two reasons for this.
First, there is a lack of good distribution channels. When Web2 payment is already very popular, it is often the channel that determines the means of payment, while the non-payment means can create channels in reverse. Therefore, the narrative of taking away the profits of Web2 middlemen and distributing them to users is reasonable, but it cannot be promoted. This channel limitation not only limits the promotion of Web3 payment methods, but also limits the development of all Web3 products that rely on large DAU (such as games and social networking). However, Telegram, due to its background, actively supports Crypto and becomes the first channel with sufficient traffic and sufficient motivation to promote decentralized payment methods.
Second, the conversion rate is low. In addition to being limited by channels, Web3 projects in the past were also limited by low conversion rates due to poor wallet experience, which made traditional delivery channels meaningless. However, Telegram integrates wallets, dApps, and fiat currency deposits and withdrawals, which can effectively improve the conversion rate.
Based on the above two points, the TON ecosystem also provides traffic support from official channels (TON Foundation actively promotes Catizen on many occasions) and has built the infrastructure for traffic conversion to users. It is logically reasonable to expect a TON ecosystem with a large number of wallet users.
(3) Users of the TON ecosystem have the ability to pay
For traditional game developers, the narrative of the Web3 game platform "bypassing the platform, reducing commissions, and increasing profits" has finally become possible. By default, to top up directly in the game, you need to purchase Telegram's virtual token Star through the App Store, and then use Star to purchase in-game props. Various commissions are inevitable in this link.
However, if you top up through an independent Top-Up Bot, you can use $TON/$USDT to buy items directly from Catizen at a 10% discount. Of Catizen’s revenue of more than $11 million in the first two months, 80% was paid through $TON. This level of volume is enough for us to look forward to the emergence of a Web3 channel with almost no middleman commission.
(4) The ecosystem is still relatively early
As mentioned above, Catizen’s current gameplay has not made many innovations compared to the 2018 game “Cute Dog Transformation”. This situation is not unique to Catizen. A large number of mini-games on Telegram are still simple transplants of early mini-games that have been verified on WeChat. Not only are there no innovations in the gameplay, but there are even castrations. Therefore, even if the TON ecosystem relies on copying the old path of domestic mini-game iterations, there is still a lot of room for development.
In addition to the quality of the game, TON ecosystem games also rely on a single monetization model of in-app purchases, and are not combined with advertising monetization. Therefore, if the TON and Telegram game ecosystems can develop, then an advertising traffic platform targeting the Telegram ecosystem and TON chain users is destined to be born.
Risks of TON ecosystem: crowd limitation, token concentration
(1) The spiritual core of mini-games is different from that of Crypto, and financial applications still need to be explored
For exchanges, it is relatively feasible to obtain new user registrations through TON’s mini-games, because users will inevitably need a scenario to convert deposits and withdrawals after obtaining token airdrops. Currently, Pixelverse has cooperated with Bybit Web3 wallet; TapSwap also has built-in tasks for Binance new user registrations.
But what is more important is the conversion rate of these new users who continue to participate in transactions after selling their coins.
From the author's personal point of view, even with the great success of $NOT tokens, the speculative retention of new Crypto users brought by casual games in exchanges may still not be ideal. The main reason is that the model of casual games is closer to the core of PoW, which emphasizes that one investment will get a return; while the model of exchanges is closer to the casino model of "willing to gamble and accept the loss", which produces the excitement of ups and downs. The two products have different cores in terms of the population.
Therefore, in addition to exploring the direction of mini-games, it is still necessary to actively explore the DeFi products of the TON ecosystem and give full play to the advantages of the TON ecosystem in channels and conversion rates.
(2) Telegram users are not concentrated in crypto-friendly and payment-capable regions
According to Statista data, the top five download regions for Telegram are India, Russia, the United States, Indonesia and Brazil, most of which are not crypto-friendly; and Japan and South Korea, regions with strong enthusiasm for cryptocurrency trading and ability to pay for small games, did not even make the top ten.
(3) $TON Token Concentration
There are already a lot of data showing that more than 90% of $TON tokens are concentrated in the hands of 100 addresses. The concentration of $TON tokens is a sword hanging over the heads of every ecosystem participant and builder.
(4) PointFi cannot escape. The current token issuance model of the TON ecosystem is easy to manipulate.
Since the games in the Telegram mini-program are supported by both on-chain and off-chain payment methods, and the game's numerical values and logic are not fully on-chain, when in this context, "points" or "numerical values (such as token production capacity)" in the game are used as standard airdrops, it leaves a lot of uncertainty. Before the tokens are released, it is extremely difficult to predict the actual distribution of chips.
Summarize
This article mainly starts from Catizen to explore the future possibilities of TON ecosystem. For small games, there is often no fixed methodology for hot-selling games, and they rely more on "innovation emergence" and "efficient delivery". From the perspective of game mode, Catizen does not belong to the heavy game mode that can lock high-paying players for a long time. The subsequent development potential of Catizen and $CATI depends on the empowerment of its $CATI token economic model (one game and one coin, or $CATI as a governance token throughout) and Catizen's subsequent operational capabilities and product selection capabilities.
But no matter how Catizen develops, its current success reflects many potential problems and potentials of the TON ecosystem. The TON ecosystem is still worthy of our long-term attention.
References
https://docsend.com/view/h9x78qwy4yz2bfd7
https://www.youxituoluo.com/532105.html
