It feels like the whole world knows about “Hamster Kombat” despite it simply being a clicker/cards game where you literally do nothing more than tap your screen to earn coins, then use those coins to buy and upgrade cards that earn you more coins, passively, for 3hrs.
First off, 300 million users is an insane achievement. Surely, not all said users are unique as many individuals running multiple accounts exist. Notwithstanding, the game had over 80 million active players prior to announcing the listing of its token, HMSTR.
Post-announcement, it's active users grew to 100 million+. It has honestly been an interesting journey with this game. It broke several records including having the largest Telegram channel, having the fastest growing YouTube channel(before Christiano Ronaldo broke that record some weeks back) and also the fastest growing digital product, it literally beat the growth of ChatGPT.
This all happened with “Crypto” as the underlying trend. If you had the luxury to follow up stories of this mini app game on Telegram you'd confirm it has been a significant event in crypto. The standard it has set is so high that I'm certain it will take a very long time before any product or service within web3 or outside to reach.
The growth experienced by projects on Telegram and generally TON has shown that blockchain is not there yet when it comes to scalability.
Notcoin onboarded over 11 million people to TON, and got active addresses above 4 million. $DOGS, the Telegram-based memecoin originating from the Spotty mascot of VKontakte social, which was founded by Pavel Durov, Telegram's CEO, on-boarded over 20 million people to TON and it's airdrop listing event broke TON, Bybit and Binance.
I mean, I get it if TON breaks, I believe it lasted for about 2 days and many memes comparing Solana’s downtime in the past to TON’s downtime populated the space, but causing Bybit and the giant of exchangers, Binance to be overloaded is some next level event.
Now, Hamster Kombat, which has reported that over 131 million players qualified for the airdrop will be listed on major exchanges on 26th, including Binance.
Ton, is quite frankly, liable to break, again. However, this event will also mark the first stress test of TON’s new tech, designed to scale huge token distribution like airdrops as big as Hamster Kombat's and limit the load on the network.
That said tech is “Mintless Jetton Technology” and it reportedly enables anyone to create and instantly distribute tokens to millions of users on TON for a small fee and less load on the Network.
So far, they've tested this with 18 million wallets and Hamster Kombat will reportedly use this to distribute tokens to its players on-chain.
There's at least 30 million players that will be receiving their tokens on-chain, others will receive off-chain via exchangers. That said, it's not predictable what each user will decide to do with their drops, and the token may attract other buyers. So whilst the mintless jetton tech may aid the initial distribution to be low cost, further movement of the token by a community of over 130 million people could still crash TON.
Regardless, this will be the largest airdrop in history of airdrops in terms of the number beneficiaries. Will it also be the largest in terms of value distributed?
That is left to be seen on September 26th.
