TON’s click-to-earn gambit comes to a head this month.
Several projects on the Telegram-linked blockchain, including Hamster Kombat, Blum, and Catizen, are primed to reward their teeming users with more than $1 billion worth of tokens this month.
While the excitement is palpable, concerns are mounting over the recent arrest of Telegram founder Pavel Durov in France and the network’s ability to handle the strain of airdrop claimants who will number in the hundreds of millions. An airdrop is when users of a crypto network are given tokens for being users.
Still, the TON team is confident the network’s infrastructure is up to the task, even if minor hiccups occur.
“It would not be realistic to expect no issues to arise when we are discussing potentially onboarding hundreds of millions of people,” TON Society co-founder John Booth told DL News. “Nothing like this has ever been attempted before, and we’re proud to be making history.”
Booth also dismissed fears that Durov’s arrest, which spooked investors, would affect the airdrops.
Network outage
During the DOGS airdrop last month, TON’s network went offline for two hours.
DOGS is a TON-based memecoin project that distributed $550 million worth of its tokens to users. The project attracted 53 million players.
Despite the network outage, Booth said the airdrop was a success, citing the 17 million wallets that claimed tokens.
Booth told DL News that TON achieved in two weeks what it took major blockchains much longer: onboarding millions of users.
“TON now counts itself as part of an extremely rare class of blockchains, where too much usage has led to problems,” Booth said. “With every problem exposed and resolved, TON blockchain and the infrastructure supporting it continues to grow stronger.”
Many of the forthcoming projects boast even greater numbers. Here are three highly anticipated TON airdrops.
Hamster Kombat
Hamster Kombat launched in March and peaked at 300 million global users, though an indeterminate number could be bots.
It’s a clicker mini-game where users embody a Hamster avatar to be groomed into a virtual crypto exchange CEO.
Users level up their avatars by tapping to earn coins and completing daily tasks. There’s also a mining level where users can upgrade the speed at which they acquire in-game tokens.
Hamster Kombat plans to airdrop its HMSTR token on September 26, but users have reason to be cautious.
That’s because the airdrop was originally billed to hit the market in July.
Catizen
Catizen is a cat-themed clicker game on TON.
The goal is to breed cats to earn tokens, a pitch the project claims has attracted 34 million users. About 800,000 of them are paying customers.
After postponing an earlier distribution, Catizen will airdrop its CATI tokens to users on September 20.
That delay was due to player backlash over the project’s $100,000 donation to animal rights group PETA.
Blum
Blum is one of the few TON clicker games that isn’t animal-themed.
It’s a vertical scrolling game, and players level up by collecting pixelated flower petals to increase their in-game score.
Players also complete daily tasks to improve their scores and can invite friends by sharing their codes.
The project claims to be backed by two former Binance employees and has amassed over 60 million users.
Blum’s airdrop is also scheduled for September 20 and has secured backing from Binance.
Osato Avan-Nomayo is our Nigeria-based DeFi correspondent. He covers DeFi and tech. To share tips or information about stories, please contact him at osato@dlnews.com.
