On September 26, Hamster Kombat—a clicker mini-game in the TON ecosystem claiming 300 million players—officially launched its airdrop. At the same time, its ecosystem token HMSTR was listed on over ten major exchanges, including Binance, OKX, Bybit, Gate.io, Bitget, and others.
Hamster Kombat has created the largest airdrop user base to date, but like other large-scale airdrops, skepticism within the community is mounting. Many users report that after months of diligent clicking, they’ve only received tokens worth $1, while circulated images show that numerous obvious bots have obtained large amounts of tokens. Have the hardworking users once again done all the work just to benefit the project team? And who are the real winners behind this airdrop frenzy involving hundreds of millions of participants?
Average airdrop amount only $3; sybil rules under scrutiny
As the user base expanded massively, distributing the airdrop became Hamster Kombat’s biggest challenge. Previous large-scale airdrops like Jupiter and Zksync had user numbers in the millions, with few experiences exceeding ten million. Especially for a project like Hamster Kombat, there was no anti-sybil mechanism designed in the early stages, and many “farming” studios participated. If the sybil detection mechanisms fail, it could harm a large number of genuine users. According to the results, Hamster Kombat officially claims to have 300 million users, but only 131 million users qualified for the airdrop, identifying about 2.3 million sybil addresses.
The total supply of HMSTR tokens is 100 billion, with 60% allocated for this airdrop, totaling 60 billion tokens. Based on 130 million users, the average airdrop per user is about 458 tokens, which amounts to approximately 3.2 at a price of 0.07.
From the data, HMSTR’s market cap is about 440 millions which is lower than the dog/s 640 millions and also below NOT’s initial $1 billion. This shows that Hamster Kombat’s market value hasn’t gained extra premium despite its over 100 million users. Instead, due to continuous delays in the airdrop and token listing, and after several TON ecosystem traffic products launched, the market’s interest in similar products has decreased. Therefore, the value of tokens distributed to each user is relatively low.
Naturally, the community has many complaints about this outcome. A user @roe1527 vented on Twitter, saying he participated for 109 days and ended up with about $17 worth of tokens that still need to be unlocked in batches. He concluded, “Maybe I don’t care much about this little airdrop, but you should at least respect people’s hard work. This is too shady; your reputation will really stink.”
A player nicknamed Timbo said he played the game almost from the beginning, spending about 4-5 hours a day for two months, and earned about 500 tokens (only $3.5).
Team, TON Blockchain, and Exchanges: The Biggest Winners?
Aside from the users, the project team, exchanges, and the TON blockchain are the biggest winners in this massive airdrop.
Looking at the TON blockchain, data shows that since September, the number of addresses on the TON blockchain has increased by 30 million—a surge of about 50%. Additionally, the TON Foundation recently announced on their channel that TON’s monthly active wallets have reached 10 million, hitting a new all-time high.
The exponential growth in TON’s ecosystem is mainly driven by the explosion of several mini-games. In early June, the number of addresses was only 27 million. According to a Binance report, as of September 12, the number of Hamster Kombat connections to TON wallets was 55 million.
The massive user base has likely brought substantial advertising revenue to Hamster Kombat. Currently, Hamster Kombat’s Telegram channel has about 60 million subscribers, their YouTube account boasts around 37.6 million subscribers, and they have 14.2 million followers on Twitter. Such enormous traffic represents monetizable assets on any platform. The official Hamster Kombat Telegram channel began accepting advertisements early on. Based on Telegram’s minimum CPM (cost per thousand impressions) of 2 euros, and considering the most recent Hamster Kombat ad received 50 million views, revenue from just that one ad should be at least 100,000 euros. Not to mention, ads are pushed almost daily on the Hamster Kombat channel, so this revenue could reach tens of millions of dollars.
In addition to the project team and the TON ecosystem, the Hamster Kombat airdrop also sparked an exchange competition similar to the earlier DOGS event. Exchanges like Binance, OKX, HashKey Global, Bitget, and others launched trading or airdrop activities targeting the HMSTR token. In this battle to capture funds and traffic, Binance emerged as the biggest winner.
As of September 27, HMSTR tokens held in Binance addresses accounted for about 18%, the highest among major exchanges, with Bybit and OKX following closely behind. According to data from CoinMarketCap, HMSTR’s trading volume in the past 24 hours exceeded $1 billion, ranking 12th among all tokens globally. Binance’s trading volume accounted for nearly half, making it the largest market after HMSTR’s airdrop. However, it’s currently unknown how many new users Hamster Kombat has brought to the exchanges. Previously, Bybit founder Ben Zhou predicted in an interview with Wu Blockchain that Hamster’s user acquisition effect might start to diminish. On-chain data shows that the number of addresses holding HMSTR tokens is only 214,000.
Reflecting on Its Growth Journey: Leveraging Game Playability and Clever Strategies to Rank Number One Globally in Subscriptions
Hamster Kombat’s success is an atypical case. In March 2023, without any investment news or clear backing, Hamster Kombat created a channel on Telegram and launched the game. PANews was the first media outlet in the Chinese community to report on the game; when PANews noticed it in May this year, there was almost no discussion on Twitter. At that time, under the influence of Notcoin, the TON ecosystem saw the emergence of several clicker mini-games, and with Notcoin’s traffic redirection, they all gained decent traction—Hamster Kombat was one of them. Other mini-games that were hotspots alongside Hamster Kombat included Tapswap, Catizen, and others.
In May, Hamster Kombat had 15 million users—not quite as many as Tapswap’s 20 million—but its Telegram channel was already the third largest globally. In the following months, Hamster Kombat claimed its user base reached 300 million, and currently, its Telegram channel boasts 69 million subscribers, ranking first in the world.
Looking back at why Hamster Kombat went viral, it was likely due to its exceptional playability. Unlike other clicker games, while Hamster Kombat also involves clicking to accumulate coins, as the game progresses, the main gameplay shifts to simulating investment games using in-game coins. Essentially, Hamster Kombat is a virtual management game that starts with clicking, making it more engaging than its competitors.
Another reason for its rapid growth is the team’s savvy traffic acquisition strategies. Hamster Kombat’s game mechanics also introduced ways to earn points by inviting friends and following social media accounts. The difference is that Hamster Kombat launched a daily news program, hiding daily big reward codes within these shows. Players need to watch videos or search in the comment sections on social media to find the codes. This not only rapidly increased Hamster Kombat’s social media followers but also garnered a large number of genuine views. As a result, they received more recommendations from social media platform algorithms, which may have played a key role in Hamster Kombat’s subsequent traffic monetization.
Overall, Hamster Kombat’s success has opened up new ideas for many project teams. Instead of attracting users through massive fundraising combined with airdrop strategies, they laid a foundation of traffic through the game’s playability and airdrop expectations, and maximized the retention of that traffic as monetizable assets (such as various social media accounts). However, compared to previous airdrops where earnings could easily reach thousands of dollars, this method of “many people sharing little profit” isn’t winning over the airdrop hunters. The golden age of airdrop feasts might be gone for good.