Tap-to-earn-to-airdrop became a thing after the success of notcoin, and now, $DOGS is probably going to precede that success, but bigger projects like Hamster Kombat that has undoubtedly unboarded people into crypto through this model might just be the reason why it (this model) will fail.
To be more specific, Hamster Kombat took advantage of notcoin's success to grow into a much larger project. Other project launched when it did, but I can't exactly say why it pulled over 300 million registered accounts, and other projects of the same prototype have ten times lesser than that.
However, I believe I understand what happened. People are more likely to trust projects that have a larger user base. The "too big to fail" mindset. It is prevalent in cryptocurrency and everywhere else.
Take a look at when Luna failed, it was a very big project, running scam and leveraging the popularity even when they had zero fund of customer's money.
I believe Hamster Kombat grew in popularity as a result of this mentality, rather than the referral system, which is present in every project. They have become extremely successful in just over 6 months, and they have used their user base to generate unimaginable wealth through their social media platforms and YouTube.
They now have 300 million registered accounts, but 30 to 50 million active users, and more than 18 YouTube channels, with an average of over 30 million views per day. That means they have over 540 million views per day; imagine that in a month. Given that they generated this revenue in 2 to 3 months, you can see how leveraging a user community can produce mind-blowing results.
It becomes even more morbid when they decide to collect external ads from web2 gaming apps while migrating millions of their users to these apps with the promise of a large airdop in exchange for actively participating.
I have to applaud these guys for their evil ingenuity, because this is what I call smart farming. They have transitioned from a potential tap-to-earn airdop project/model to something completely different.
They are attempting to maximize the potential size of the active community in order to make money in any way possible, and I would not be surprised if they introduce the selling of personal data by asking users to participate in surveys in order to increase their chances of earning. Numbers are everything.
When you have people who are committed to a particular cause, a project becomes very lucrative.
Now, evil ingenuity occurs when the project in question refuses to give back, which is exactly what Hamster Kombat has done. I give them credit because they have discovered a way to properly gamify a community, because they understand that attention is money on the internet, and they have demonstrated how real wealth can be created when web2 collaborates with web3.
However, they are already causing problems for the model by demanding too much.
I know they probably onboarded a lot of regular users, but these guys are beginning to wake up to the farming that Hamster Kombat is actually doing.
Now, people might not have realized this if they actually launched the project, announced their token generation event, and did the Airdrop, they can actually continue a second phase, thereby keeping their loyal community and increasing the gamification of the project while promising bigger incentives, viola!! Unfortunately, they have become extremely greedy, which has impacted their monthly telegram users who are playing the game.
The MAU has dropped from 155 million to 89 million in less than a week as a result of their never-ending promises. Although they stated that they are looking for a way to do the airdop and promised to be the biggest airdop in history (this is self-aggrandizement/marketing), they may end up being one of the biggest fails in airdop history due to a minor oversight: greed.
Now, one could argue that airdropping 300 million accounts is difficult, but based on their YouTube channel, which has about 35 million subscribers, I believe they only have 45 million human players; the rest are Sybil and bots. They are probably trying to keep the community, make more money from them, and give fewer rewards while still retaining at least 85% of their users who generate revenue for them.
They have seen what happened to Pixelverse, which launched, lost over 95% of their community, and is now struggling to retain 100k players or less. HK does not want this, and their stalling is simply an attempt to find ways to keep people while increasing profits.
On The Up Side...
HK may genuinely care about their users, but they have deviously farmed the community without communicating their intentions, which is one of the characteristics of a smart scammer. I used to love the project; it has/had a lot of potentials, but if they do not salvage what is currently on the ground by doing the necessary things, they will fail by sacrificing their promising future for the millions they are currently enjoying, and community is everything in this industry.
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