Hamster Kombat has created the largest airdrop user scale to date, but as with the results of other large airdrops, there have been continuous doubts from the community.
By Frank, PANews
On September 26th, Hamster Kombat, a mini-game with 300 million players, officially launched its airdrop, with its ecosystem token HMSTR simultaneously listed on more than ten mainstream exchanges such as Binance, OKEx, Bybit, Gate.io, and Bitget.
Hamster Kombat has created the largest airdrop user scale to date, but as with other large airdrops, there have been continuous doubts from the community. Many users have provided feedback that after months of hard clicking, they only received tokens worth $1, while circulated images show that many obvious bots received a large number of tokens. Have the hardworking users once again made a wedding dress for the project party? And who are the real winners behind this airdrop feast involving hundreds of millions of users?
The average airdrop amount is only $3, and the fairness of the rules is being questioned
With the accumulation of a large number of users, how to distribute the airdrop has become the biggest challenge for Hamster Kombat. In the past, large-scale airdrops such as Jupiter and Zksync had user numbers in the millions, with few experiences exceeding tens of millions. Especially for projects like Hamster Kombat, there was no anti-whale mechanism designed in the early stage, and a large number of "hair-pulling" studios participated. If the mechanism for identifying whales does not work, it will harm a large number of real users. From the results, Hamster Kombat officially claimed that the number of users reached 300 million, but the number of users eligible for the airdrop was 131 million, with about 2.3 million whale addresses identified.
The total issuance of HMSTR tokens is 100 billion, and the airdrop ratio this time is 60%. According to this calculation, the total airdrop quantity this time is 60 billion tokens. Based on 130 million users, the average airdrop quantity per user is about 458 tokens, which is approximately $3.20 at a price of $0.007.
From the data, the market value of HMSTR is about $4.4 billion, which is lower than the initial $6.4 billion market value of DOGS and the initial $10 billion market value of NOT. It can be seen that the market value of Hamster Kombat has not received more premium due to its user base of over 100 million, but instead, due to the continuous delay of the airdrop and token listing, the market's interest in similar products has decreased. Therefore, the value of tokens received by each user is relatively low.
Naturally, the community has many complaints about such results. User @roe1527 complained on Twitter that they participated for 109 days and ultimately received tokens worth about 17U, which will be unlocked in batches. @roe1527 finally commented, "Maybe I don't care much about this airdrop, but we should also respect the labor results of the people. It's too dark, and the reputation will really stink."
PANews also wrote an article after the airdrop rules were released, titled "Token Distribution Causes Controversy, Hamster Kombat, a Game that Once Fired the Fascia Gun, Offends Players," mentioning a player nicknamed Timbo who claimed to have played this game almost from the beginning, playing the game for about 4-5 hours a day for two months, and earned about 500 tokens (only $3.5).
The project party, TON public chain, and exchanges become the biggest winners?
In addition to users, the project party, exchanges, and the TON public chain are all winners of this largest airdrop.
From the perspective of the TON public chain, data shows that the number of addresses on the TON public chain has increased by 30 million since September, an increase of about 50%. And the TON Foundation recently announced in its channel that the monthly active wallet count of TON has reached 10 million, reaching a historical high.
The ecological data of TON shows an exponential increase mainly relying on the outbreak of multiple mini-games, with the number of addresses in early June being only 27 million. According to Binance's report, as of September 12th, the number of addresses linked to the TON wallet by Hamster Kombat was 55 million.
The large number of users may have also brought considerable advertising revenue to Hamster Kombat. Hamster Kombat currently has approximately 60 million subscribers on its Telegram channel, 37.6 million subscribers on its YouTube account, and 14.2 million Twitter followers. Such huge traffic represents an asset that can be monetized on any platform. The official Telegram channel of Hamster Kombat started accepting advertising placements very early on. Based on Telegram's CPM (cost per thousand impressions) being at least 2 euros, with the recent Hamster Kombat ad views of 50 million, the income from this ad should be at least 100,000 euros, not to mention that ads in the Hamster Kombat channel are almost pushed every day, and this income may reach tens of millions of dollars.
In addition to the project party and the TON ecosystem, this airdrop by Hamster Kombat has also triggered a large-scale exchange battle similar to the one before DOGS. Exchanges such as Binance, OKEx, HashKey Global, and Bitget have successively launched trading or airdrop activities for the HMSTR token. In this round of competition for capital flow, Binance has become the biggest winner.
As of September 27th, Binance's HMSTR address accounted for approximately 18% of the total, making it the highest among major exchanges, followed closely by Bybit, OKEx, and others. According to CMC's data, the trading volume of HMSTR in the past 24 hours exceeded $1 billion, ranking 12th among all tokens on the network, with nearly half of the trading volume coming from Binance, making it the largest market after the HMSTR airdrop. However, it is currently unknown how many new users Hamster Kombat has brought to the exchanges. Ben Zhou, the founder of Bybit, also predicted in an interview with Wu Shuo that the new user acquisition effect of Hamster may begin to decline. From the on-chain data, the number of addresses holding HMSTR tokens is only 214,000.
Looking back on its growth, leveraging the playability of the game and drainage methods to drive the number one global subscription ranking
The success of Hamster Kombat is atypical. In March 2024, Hamster Kombat created a channel on Telegram and launched the game without any investment news or a clear background. PANews was the earliest media in the Chinese community to report on this game. When PANews noticed the game in May, there was almost no discussion on Twitter. At that time, driven by Notcoin, the TON ecosystem saw the emergence of multiple click-based mini-games, and with the help of Notcoin's traffic, Hamster Kombat was one of them. Other games that occupied the traffic trend at the same time as Hamster Kombat included Tapswap and Catizen.
In May, the number of users of Hamster Kombat was 15 million, although not as many as Tapswap (20 million users), its TG channel was already the third largest in the world. In the following months, Hamster Kombat claimed to have reached 300 million users, and currently, its TG channel has 69 million subscribers, ranking first globally.
Looking back at the reasons for Hamster Kombat's rise to fame, it may be mainly due to its excellent playability. Unlike other click games, although Hamster Kombat also has a gameplay of accumulating coins by clicking, as the game upgrades, the main gameplay changes to simulating investment games with game coins. Essentially, Hamster Kombat is a virtual management game with clicking as the hook, so it surpasses other competitors in terms of playability.
Another reason for its rapid growth is the team and its savvy drainage methods. Within the game mechanics of Hamster Kombat, they also introduced mechanisms to earn points through inviting friends and following social media accounts. The difference is that Hamster Kombat launched a daily news program, hiding the daily large rewards passwords in these programs. Players need to watch videos or search for passwords in the comments section of social media. This not only rapidly increased the number of fans on Hamster Kombat's social media, but also gained a large number of real views, thereby obtaining more recommendations from social media platform algorithms. These algorithm recommendations may have played a key role in the subsequent traffic monetization of Hamster Kombat.
Overall, the success of Hamster Kombat has opened up new ideas for many project parties. Compared to attracting users through high financing combined with airdrop gameplay, it has laid the foundation for traffic through the playability of the game and airdrop expectations, and maximized the precipitation of traffic into monetizable assets (such as various social media accounts). However, compared to the previous airdrops that easily yielded thousands of profits, this distribution method of having many people and little rewards is not recognized by the "hair-pulling" party, and the airdrop feast may be gone for good.
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