Author: Frank, PANews
On September 26, the TON ecosystem click game Hamster Kombat, which claims to have 300 million players, officially launched an airdrop, and its ecosystem token HMSTR was simultaneously launched on more than a dozen mainstream exchanges including Binance, OKX, Bybit, Gate.io, and Bitget.
Hamster Kombat has created the largest number of airdrop users to date, but like other large airdrops, the community has been questioning the results. Many users reported that they only received tokens worth $1 after working hard for several months, while the circulated pictures showed that many obvious robots received a large number of tokens. Have the hard-working users once again made things difficult for the project? And who is the winner behind this airdrop feast with hundreds of millions of users participating?
The average airdrop amount is only $3, and the witch rule is questioned
With the accumulation of a large number of users, how to distribute airdrops has become the biggest problem for Hamster Kombat. The number of users of previous large-scale airdrops such as Jupiter and Zksync were all in the millions, and there were few experiences exceeding 10 million. Especially for a project like Hamster Kombat, no anti-sybil mechanism was designed in the early stage, and a large number of wool party studios participated in it. If the mechanism for identifying witches fails to work, it will harm a large number of real users. From the results, Hamster Kombat officially claimed that the number of users reached 300 million, and the number of users who finally met the airdrop qualifications was 131 million, and about 2.3 million witch addresses were found.
The total issuance of HMSTR tokens is 100 billion, and the airdrop ratio this time is 60%. Based on this calculation, the total airdrop amount this time is 60 billion. Based on 130 million users, the average airdrop amount per user is about 458 tokens, which is about 3.2 US dollars at a price of 0.007 US dollars.
From the data, HMSTR's market value is about 440 million US dollars, which is lower than the 640 million US dollars when DOGS was first launched, and also lower than the 1 billion US dollars when NOT was first launched. It can be seen that the market value of Hamster Kombat has not received more premium due to its over 100 million users. On the contrary, due to the continuous postponement of airdrops and token launches, after the launch of multiple Ton ecological traffic products, the market's interest in similar products has also decreased. Therefore, the value of the tokens allocated to each user is relatively low.
The community is naturally dissatisfied with this result. User @roe1527 complained on Twitter that he participated for 109 days and finally got tokens worth about 17U, which need to be unlocked in batches. @roe1527 finally commented, "Maybe I don't care much about this airdrop, but I have to respect the fruits of people's labor. It's too shady, and my reputation will really be ruined."
PANews also wrote an article after the airdrop rules were released titled "Token distribution causes trouble, the hamster game "Hamster Kombat" that once made the fascia gun popular still offended players", mentioning a player nicknamed Timbo who said that he played the game almost from the beginning, playing for about 4-5 hours a day for two months, and earned about 500 tokens (only US$3.5).
Are the project owners, TON public chain, and exchanges the biggest winners?
In addition to users, project owners, exchanges and TON public chain are all winners of this largest airdrop.
From the perspective of the TON public chain, data shows that the number of addresses of the TON public chain has increased by 30 million since September, an increase of about 50%. In addition, the TON Foundation recently announced in its channel that the number of monthly active wallets of TON has reached 10 million, a record high.
The exponential growth of TON's ecological data is mainly due to the explosion of multiple small games. The number of addresses in early June was only 27 million. According to Binance's report, as of September 12, the number of Hamster Kombat links to TON wallets was 55 million.
A large number of users may also bring considerable advertising revenue to Hamster Kombat. Hamster Kombat currently has about 60 million subscribers to its TG channel, about 37.6 million subscribers to its Youtube account, and 14.2 million Twitter followers. Such a huge amount of traffic represents a monetizable asset on any platform. Hamster Kombat's official TG channel has long been accepting advertising. According to Telegram's CPM (cost per thousand impressions) of at least 2 euros, based on the most recent Hamster Kombat ad views of 50 million, the revenue from this ad should be at least 100,000 euros, not to mention that ads in the Hamster Kombat channel are pushed almost every day, and this revenue may reach tens of millions of dollars.
In addition to the project and TON ecosystem, the Hamster Kombat airdrop also triggered a war for talent among exchanges similar to the one before DOGS. Exchanges such as Binance, OKX, HashKey Global, and Bitget have launched trading or airdrop activities for HMSTR tokens. In this round of capital flow competition, Binance became the biggest winner.
As of September 27, HMSTR accounts for about 18% of Binance addresses, the highest share among major exchanges, followed by Bybit, OKX and others. According to CMC data, HMSTR's trading volume in the past 24 hours exceeded US$1 billion, ranking 12th among all tokens on the entire network. Binance Exchange's trading volume accounts for nearly half, becoming the largest market after the HMSTR airdrop. However, it is still unknown how many new users Hamster Kombat has brought to exchanges. Previously, Bybit founder Ben Zhou also predicted in an interview with Wu Shuo that Hamster's new user acquisition effect may begin to decrease. Judging from the data on the chain, the number of addresses holding HMSTR tokens is only 214,000.
Looking back on the growth path, the number of subscriptions has been ranked first in the world by leveraging the game's playability and traffic-generating techniques.
The success of Hamster Kombat is an atypical case. In March 2024, Hamster Kombat created a channel on TG and launched the game without any investment news or background information. PANews was the first media in the Chinese community to report on the game. When PANews noticed the game in May this year, there was almost no discussion on Twitter. At that time, driven by Notcoin, many click-based mini-games emerged in the TON ecosystem, and with the help of Notcoin's diversion, they all gained good traffic. Hamster Kombat was one of them. Other mini-games that occupied the traffic outlet at the same time as Hamster Kombat included Tapswap, Catizen and other games.
In May, Hamster Kombat had 15 million users, which was less than Tapswap (20 million users), but its TG channel was already the third largest in the world. In the following months, Hamster Kombat claimed that its user base had reached 300 million, and currently its TG channel subscriptions are 69 million, ranking first in the world.
Looking back at the reasons why Hamster Kombat became popular, it may be mainly due to its excellent playability. Unlike other click games, Hamster Kombat also has a gameplay of clicking to accumulate coins, but as the game upgrades, the main gameplay changes to simulating investment games by using game coins. In essence, Hamster Kombat is a virtual business game that uses clicking as an introduction, so it surpasses several other competitors in terms of playability.
Another reason for the rapid growth is inseparable from the team and its savvy traffic-generating techniques. Hamster Kombat's game mechanism also introduces mechanisms such as inviting friends and following social media accounts to gain points. The difference is that Hamster Kombat launched a daily news program, hiding the daily large reward passwords in these programs. Players need to watch videos or look for passwords in the comments section of social media. This not only allowed Hamster Kombat's social media fans to grow rapidly, but also gained a large number of real views, thereby obtaining more recommendations from social media platform algorithms. These algorithm recommendations may play a key role in Hamster Kombat's subsequent traffic monetization.
In general, the success of Hamster Kombat has opened up new ideas for many project owners. Instead of using high financing amounts and airdrops to attract users, the game's playability and airdrop expectations can lay a foundation for traffic, and maximize the accumulation of traffic into liquid assets (such as various social media accounts). However, compared with the previous airdrops that easily yielded tens of thousands of yuan in revenue, this distribution method with more people and less meat is not recognized by the Mao Mao Party, and the airdrop feast may be gone forever.
