DeFi
Is Hamster Kombat bringing the masses into DeFi?
The TON-based game claims to have over 140 million users competing for its next airdrop.
It’s over, crypto people, we’ve finally gone mainstream! Or that’s what a cursory look at Hamster Kombat’s numbers would have you think.
The so-called “tap-to-earn” game built on the Telegram blockchain TONNEclaims it has nearly 150 million total users interacting with its game. Not only that, but the team claims to have reached 100 million users faster such as WhatsApp, Instagram and TikTok.
He also claims to have over 20 million Youtube subscribers and 36 million Telegram subscribers.
Although the rapid rise of Hamster Komba’s social media accounts and active users is unprecedented, it is also likely to be misleading.
Founder of Primitive businessesDovey Wan, said Hamster Komnbat’s growth is driven by “industrial farming” and said that instead of “tap to win”, the dApp’s gaming model should be called “tap to counter”.
“It may be fair to assume that the numbers for most consumer-facing dApps are completely artificial when incentives are aligned with professional dApps and farms,” she said.
Hamster Kombat’s inflated numbers are a reminder that dApp and blockchain usage figures shouldn’t be taken literally, especially when projects implement incentives that can encourage users to create multiple accounts and interact only to collect rewards.
Hamster Kombat did not respond to a request for comment.
Made possible by mini-apps on Telegram, Click-to-Earn games quickly gained users after the success of Notcoin.
Notcoin popularized the genre after launching on May 16 with a market capitalization of around $700 million before climbing to $2.6 billion on June 4.
Airdrop farmers flocked to this opportunity, leading to a surge in active wallet addresses on TON since May 17. The daily active addresses of TON itself reversed Ethereum on June 1, with Tonstat reporting 455,000 active TON addresses, compared to 434,000 active ETH addresses reported by Etherscan.
Hamster Kombat Airdrop
Hamster Kombat, in particular, is attracting attention due to its growth on social media and its upcoming Token Generation Event (TGE) in July.
The game and its data are currently kept off-chain. Users can sign up to play by joining the gaming channel on their Telegram app and tapping a hamster to collect coins. The objective of the game is to collect as many coins as possible and then use them to generate more coins before the TGE.
In the game, users can tap to win, upgrade their account, mine coins, refer their friends to get bonuses, and optionally claim their tokens on-chain by connecting a TON compatible wallet.