Author: TechFlow
From the satisfaction of primitive hunting and gathering to the instant feedback that can be easily obtained through various digital media in modern society, human development seems to have been pursuing a key neurotransmitter in the brain: dopamine.
Dopamine is not just a simple "happiness factor", but also the core force that drives human pursuit, learning and adaptation. However, dopamine is both a reward and a dilemma. In the crypto market, the influence of dopamine is further amplified: whether it is the crypto market full of speculation or the Telegram Mini Game that has emerged in recent years, various addictive reward mechanisms cleverly use human desire for dopamine to bring unprecedented user stickiness and economic models.
Existence is reasonable. Let’s put aside the condemnation of blind addiction mechanism for the moment and look into the current trend of mini-games in the Telegram×TON ecosystem. We can’t help but ask: Is this economic model based on instant gratification truly sustainable? The “click and get” game model undoubtedly triggers the reward center in the user’s brain at all times, but dopamine comes and goes quickly. Can the game model that relies on users’ short-term pleasure as a pillar evolve into a long-term stable economic ecosystem?
After Notcoin became popular, the "Tap to Earn" model has once again attracted market attention. Catizen, which is regarded as a product in the same field, has attracted widespread attention from the market. On the surface, Catizen is another representative "Tap to Earn" game after Notcoin. However, if Catizen is only regarded as another short-term project playing with the dopamine mechanism, you may miss the opportunity to understand its true potential.
As TGE is approaching, this article will delve into the development and planning of Catizen. By analyzing Catizen’s operating data, strategic layout, and its token planning, we will see how Catizen, as a phenomenal game, can seamlessly connect the "first half" with outstanding results to the "second half" full of potential after TGE.
Catizen: The traffic brought by the phenomenon in the first half
With its well-designed game mechanism and the market's expectations, Catizen has taken the lead in the "Tap to Earn" craze. The user growth problem that many project owners find difficult is naturally not a problem for Catizen, which is well versed in the charm of dopamine economics.
The myth of dopamine-driven growth
Catizen, which has openly embraced the huge traffic dividend brought by "Tap to Earn", has achieved outstanding results in data performance alone: as of September 16, Catizen has attracted more than 3 million active users on the chain and 2.2 million Telegram premium users, and recently achieved a weekly user growth of 4.7 million, a total number of players exceeding 39 million, and achieved revenue of more than US$31 million.
The strong payment model has attracted a considerable number of high-quality paying users. High traffic + high retention + strong payment, from the perspective of a Telegram Mini Game alone, Catizen's current performance is excellent.
Excellent operational results are inseparable from an experienced and capable operation team. Catizen is published by Pluto Studio Limited, a technology-focused game studio with more than 30 developers. Pluto Studio Limited also provides technical support for a number of Mini Games in Catizen Miniapp Center.
The excellent Pluto Studio Limited is also favored by many institutions and has received investment support from Binance Labs, HashKey Capital, Folius Ventures, and The Open Platform.
However, Catizen does not just passively harvest traffic and stop the project in a simple "click to earn money" model. Instead, it actively uses these hard-earned user attention and cleverly guides them to deeper ecological participation. Millions of active users are not only chasing short-term click rewards, but also subtly entering a carefully designed ecological network.
Traffic sets the stage, and ecology plays the show
From user growth to millions to strong paid conversions, to gaining favor from well-known investment institutions, Catizen's first half was undoubtedly a success.
The team knows that this is just the beginning. The real challenge is not how to acquire traffic, but how to convert this traffic into long-term value in the Tap2Earn track, which is seriously involuted. From the beginning, Catizen’s goal was not to frantically “volume the stock” in the mini-game track, but to choose to “increase the volume”, and regard the advantages accumulated in the first half as a springboard to a more ambitious goal. Relying on traffic, it began to expand a comprehensive ecosystem and build a truly sustainable business ecosystem with huge value.
The second half is the application center and the core of the ecosystem
As a core part of Catizen's ecological development strategy, Miniapp Center shoulders the important task of connecting the first and second halves of Catizen.
Miniapp Center
Miniapp Center is Catizen's ecological application center, providing users with multiple types of application choices based on different user portraits. Miniapp Center adopts an implantation method to place the interface entrance in the Catizen application, seamlessly taking over Catizen's traffic.
Including Catizen, there are currently ten applications launched in Miniapp Center. In addition to the main game Catizen, Mini Game Bombie launched for GameFi&Meme enthusiasts and Vanilla Trading Bot, a Telegram trading robot for crypto investors, have achieved remarkable performance after their launch.
Bombie: A playable meme game
Since we are talking about mini games, we have to mention the most popular mini game platform in the world - WeChat Mini Program. In the past two years, advertisements for various WeChat mini games have flooded various social media applications. Its simple and quickly addictive gameplay and the mechanism design that makes people unable to control their desire to spend money have made WeChat Mini Program the most profitable gaming platform in the world.
Bombie successfully copied the addictive gaming mechanism of WeChat mini-games to Telegram, while adding some Web3 ingenuity: it introduced a token airdrop mechanism similar to Dogs, combining the gameplay of "opening boxes to upgrade and infinite flow of monster fighting" with Memecoin airdrops, allowing players to not only "actively spend money" for blind box rewards, but also have the motivation to "actively make money" based on the mechanism of random Memecoin drops in the game.
Less than three weeks after its launch, Bombie has achieved self-operation: the total number of users has exceeded 1.7 million, the number of daily active users has exceeded 700,000, the number of daily paying users has exceeded 40,000, and the total game revenue has exceeded 200,000 US dollars in two weeks.
Vanilla Trading Bot: Making BTC Trading Approachable
Vanilla Trading Bot is an innovative trading tool that allows users to participate in BTC trading at extremely low cost and risk. Users only need less than $10 to operate a transaction volume equivalent to a full Bitcoin.
The operating principle of Vanilla is quite creative: Vanilla actually provides the BTC that has been purchased, and users can profit from price fluctuations on the Bot without actually buying or holding Bitcoin. It lowers the entry threshold and eliminates the risk of liquidation. Users do not have to worry about huge losses caused by extreme market conditions because they do not actually "hold" the assets they are trading.
Since its launch on September 4, Vanilla Trading Bot has gained 1.8 million registered users, 500,000 active traders, and a daily trading volume of one million transactions without any promotion or traffic.
Catizen Task: A specific use case for traffic connection
As mentioned above, Miniapp Center uses the built-in window of Catizen game as the entry mode. Similarly, Catizen also uses "built-in drainage" in the drainage mode within the ecosystem: it directly diverts traffic from Catizen game to other applications in the form of Catizen tasks + airdrop rewards. In addition, the pinning function of Miniapp Center itself has the function of diverting traffic.
Behind many successes
From the rapid launch to success of Bombie and Vanilla Trading Bot, we can see that the team has outstanding capabilities in rapid application development, migration deployment, and product optimization.
Behind the systematic success is the continuous debugging of the SDK and test engine by the Catizen team for more than half a year before the project was launched. So although it became popular in a short period of time and successfully converted into profits, the entire Catizen ecosystem is not a quick product overnight. It takes considerable time and experience accumulation to replicate the same achievements.
In general, the positioning of Miniapp Center is the application incubator + traffic center in the Catizen ecosystem, which helps new applications in the ecosystem to quickly incubate and start through the form of application launch + ecosystem joint diversion. The success of Bombie and Vanilla Trading Bot also proves the effectiveness of Catizen Miniapp Center and sustainable business model from the data dimension. In the future, this mature business model can continue to be used in the subdivision of the ecosystem.
In Catizen's second-half plan, there is not only a breakthrough in the model bottleneck Miniapp Center, but Catizen's token $CATI also runs through the entire ecosystem, becoming a link between users, games and the overall ecological economy.
CATI Token: Capturing diverse ecological values and rejecting “one-wave”
Although Catizen's initial appeal to the market largely comes from the expected upcoming coin issuance, in terms of the overall ecological layout, Catizen's attitude towards projects and tokens is not to just launch them once and for all, but to give tokens long-term multiple value capture capabilities.
TGE is coming soon, airdrop distribution details
Catizen will issue $CATI airdrops to players at the Silver level and above. All TGE shares belong to the community. The distribution details are as follows:
Airdrops and ecosystem: 43%
Airdrop: 34%
-15% 100% released at TGE (Token Generation Event) for Season 1 player rewards
-19% 0% released at TGE for future quarterly airdrops
Launchpool: 9%, 100% released at TGE
Total release in TGE phase: 30.5% (of total supply)
Player airdrop: 15% (50% of TGE release)
Launchpool：9%
Liquidity: 5%
Treasury: 1.5%
Diverse use cases, real benefits for Holders
Combined with Catizen’s long-term plan, it is clear that “one wave” is not the ultimate goal of $CATI. Catizen has designed a variety of use cases for $CATI:
Universal currency throughout the ecosystem
$CATI will serve as the universal currency for the Catizen ecosystem, Miniapp Center, Launchpool, and Open Task. Users can use $CATI to interact seamlessly throughout the ecosystem, from in-game purchases to participating in new project launches. There is always a demand for $CATI in the ecosystem.
In-game discount purchases
Users holding $CATI can purchase items and services at preferential prices in various games in Miniapp Center. Combined with the game mechanism that takes human nature into consideration, the cost of both krypton gold and gold farming can be effectively saved.
Launchpool Staking Revenue
In Catizen's ecological landscape, Launchpool must be one of the top priorities. As early as May, Catizen conducted a wave of trial mining in the game. Despite the high threshold of participation requirements, more than 170,000 users still successfully participated, with excellent results.
The current airdrop query page is online. Catizen users can already query airdrops in the game and stake $CATI airdrops on different exchanges to obtain corresponding exchange token rewards and earn additional income up to 600% APY. According to the latest data, nearly 1 million $CATI Holders have participated in staking, with a total of more than 14.4 million $CATI staked, exceeding 10% of TGE's circulation.
Long-term equity
As the main token of the ecosystem, in the future, applications within the Miniapp Center will share project revenue with $CATI Holders in different forms. According to the development speed of Catizen, it will no longer be difficult to obtain passive income by holding $CATI.
Ecological governance voting
In the future, hundreds of mini games are planned to be launched on Miniapp Center. At the same time, in order to ensure the diversified experience of users, Miniapp Center may also launch well-known Web2 games one after another. At that time, Holder can decide whether to launch the ecological application by voting.
Through diverse long-term use cases, $CATI has successfully integrated itself with all aspects of the Catizen ecosystem. The self-consistent design logic of "the more you hold, the more you own" not only protects the Holder, but also once again confirms the idea of the future development of the ecosystem: sustainable development is not just talk.
Conclusion
Through its continuously growing positive cash flow, Catizen not only verified the feasibility and sustainability of its business model, but also demonstrated its competitiveness in the TON ecosystem and the entire Crypto industry. In the current market environment full of "Mass Adoption" narratives, Catizen's alternative approach is moving towards a more pragmatic and sustainable business ecosystem.
Unlike many projects that simply emphasize the "breaking circle" strategy of attracting external users, the business ecosystem built by Catizen is more like a participation path that truly considers the interests of Web3 users.
This kind of Mass Adoption from the inside out may be the right path to break the circle.
