The largest airdrop in history saw users earning an average of only $3. Who is winning in the game Hamster Kombat?

Author: Frank, PANews

On September 26, the TON ecosystem's click game Hamster Kombat officially launched its airdrop, claiming to have 300 million players, with its ecosystem token HMSTR listed on more than a dozen mainstream exchanges including Binance, OKX, Bybit, Gate.io, and Bitget.

Hamster Kombat created the largest airdrop user base to date, but like other large airdrops, it has faced continuous skepticism from the community. Many users reported that after clicking for months, they only received tokens worth 1 dollar, while circulated images showed many obvious bots receiving large amounts of tokens. Are the hardworking users once again being taken advantage of by the project team? And who are the real winners behind this airdrop feast involving hundreds of millions of users?

Average Airdrop Amount Only 3 Dollars, Witch Rules Questioned

With the massive accumulation of users, how to distribute the airdrop became the biggest challenge for Hamster Kombat. Previous large airdrops like Jupiter and Zksync had user bases in the millions, with very few exceeding ten million. Especially for a project like Hamster Kombat, there was no anti-witch mechanism designed in the early stages, and many "farming" studios participated. If the mechanism for identifying witches fails, it could harm a large number of genuine users. From the results, Hamster Kombat officially claimed a user count of 300 million, while the final number of users eligible for the airdrop was 131 million, with about 2.3 million witch addresses identified.

The total issuance of the HMSTR token is 100 billion, with 60% allocated for this airdrop, meaning a total of 60 billion tokens were distributed. Based on 130 million users, the average airdrop amount per user is about 458 tokens, which, at a price of 0.007 dollars, is approximately 3.2 dollars.

From the data, the market capitalization of HMSTR is about 440 million dollars, which is lower than the initial 640 million dollars of DOGS and also lower than the 1 billion dollar market cap of NOT at launch. This indicates that Hamster Kombat's market value did not receive a premium due to its user base of over 100 million; instead, the continuous delays in the airdrop and token launch, along with the launch of multiple Ton ecosystem traffic products, have decreased market interest in similar products. Therefore, the value of tokens distributed to each user is relatively low.

Naturally, there is much dissatisfaction in the community regarding such results. A user named @roe1527 complained on Twitter that after participating for 109 days, he only received tokens worth about 17 dollars, which would be unlocked in batches. @roe1527 ultimately commented, "I might not care much about this airdrop, but respect for people's labor is necessary; it's too dark, and the reputation will really stink."

After the airdrop rules were released, PANews also published an article titled “Token Distribution Causes Controversy, Hamster Game 'Hamster Kombat' That Once Boosted Massage Guns Still Offends Players”, mentioning a player nicknamed Timbo, who said he played the game almost from the beginning, spending about 4-5 hours a day for two months, earning about 500 tokens (only 3.5 dollars).

Project Team, TON Public Chain, and Exchanges as the Biggest Winners?

Besides the users, the project team, exchanges, and the TON public chain are also the winners of this massive airdrop.

From the perspective of the TON public chain, data shows that the number of TON addresses has increased by 30 million since September, a growth of about 50%. The TON Foundation recently announced in a channel that the number of active wallets on TON reached 10 million, setting a new record.

The exponential growth of TON's ecosystem data mainly relies on the explosion of multiple mini-games, with only 27 million addresses in early June. According to a report from Binance, as of September 12, the number of Hamster Kombat linked to TON wallets was 55 million.

The large number of users may also bring significant advertising revenue to Hamster Kombat. Currently, Hamster Kombat has about 60 million subscribers on its TG channel, approximately 37.6 million subscribers on its YouTube account, and 14.2 million followers on Twitter. Such a massive flow represents monetizable assets on any platform. Hamster Kombat's official TG channel started accepting advertising early on. Based on Telegram's CPM (cost per thousand impressions) of at least 2 euros, with the most recent Hamster Kombat ad having 50 million views, the revenue from this advertisement should be at least 100,000 euros, not to mention that ads on the Hamster Kombat channel are pushed almost daily, potentially reaching tens of millions of dollars in revenue.

In addition to the project team and the TON ecosystem, this airdrop has also triggered a competition among exchanges similar to the previous DOGS. Exchanges like Binance, OKX, HashKey Global, and Bitget have launched trading or airdrop activities targeting the HMSTR token. In this round of competition for capital flow, Binance emerged as the biggest winner.

As of September 27, the proportion of HMSTR held by Binance addresses was about 18%, the highest among major exchanges, followed closely by Bybit and OKX. According to CMC data, the trading volume of HMSTR exceeded 1 billion dollars in the last 24 hours, ranking 12th among all tokens, with Binance accounting for nearly half of the trading volume, becoming the largest market after the HMSTR airdrop. However, it is currently unknown how many new users Hamster Kombat brought to the exchanges. Previously, Bybit founder Ben Zhou also predicted in an interview that the user acquisition effect of Hamster might start to decline. From on-chain data, the number of addresses holding HMSTR tokens is only 214,000.

Reflecting on the Growth Journey, Leveraging Game Playability and Traffic Techniques to Achieve Global Subscription Ranking First

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 clear background. PANews was one of the first media outlets in the Chinese community to report on the game. In May of this year, PANews noticed that there was almost no discussion about the game on Twitter. At that time, driven by Notcoin, multiple click mini-games emerged in the TON ecosystem, and with the traffic brought by Notcoin, they gained good visibility, with Hamster Kombat being one of them. Other mini-games that occupied the traffic peak alongside Hamster Kombat include Tapswap and Catizen.

In May, Hamster Kombat had 15 million users, which was less than Tapswap (20 million users), but its TG channel ranked as the third largest globally. In the following months, Hamster Kombat claimed to have reached 300 million users, and its TG channel currently has 69 million subscribers, ranking first in the world.

Reflecting on the reasons for Hamster Kombat's breakout, it may mainly stem from its outstanding playability. Unlike other click games, while Hamster Kombat also features a click-to-accumulate coins gameplay, as the game progresses, the main gameplay shifts to simulating investment games with game coins. Essentially, Hamster Kombat is a virtual management game triggered by clicking, thus surpassing other competitors in terms of playability.

Another reason for its rapid growth is the team's clever traffic techniques. Within Hamster Kombat's game mechanics, mechanisms for inviting friends and following social media accounts to earn points were also introduced. The difference is that Hamster Kombat launched a daily news program that hides the daily large reward passwords within these programs, requiring players to watch videos or search for passwords in the comments on social media. This not only rapidly increased Hamster Kombat's social media followers but also garnered a large number of genuine views, thus receiving more recommendations from social media platform algorithms. These algorithmic recommendations may have played a key role in the subsequent monetization of Hamster Kombat's traffic.

Overall, the success of Hamster Kombat has opened new avenues for many project teams. Instead of relying on high financing combined with airdrop strategies to attract users, it has laid a foundation for traffic through the playability of the game and airdrop expectations, maximizing the conversion of traffic into monetizable assets (such as various social media accounts). However, compared to the previous airdrops that often yielded thousands of dollars, this distribution method of many users with few rewards may not be recognized by the "farming" community, and the airdrop feast may be gone for good.