On September 26, the TON ecosystem's click game, Hamster Kombat, which boasts 300 million players, officially launched its airdrop. Its ecosystem token, HMSTR, has simultaneously gone live on over ten major exchanges including Binance, OKX, Bybit, Gate.io, and Bitget. Hamster Kombat has created the largest airdrop user base to date, but, as with the results of other large airdrops, skepticism from the community is rampant. Many users reported that after clicking diligently for months, they only received tokens worth 1 USD, while circulated images show many obvious bots receiving large amounts of tokens. Are the hard-working users once again just making a garment for the project team? And who are the real winners behind this airdrop feast involving hundreds of millions of users?

HMSTR

On September 26, the TON ecosystem's click game Hamster Kombat officially launched an airdrop, claiming to have 300 million players. Its ecosystem token HMSTR was simultaneously listed on more than ten major exchanges including Binance, OKX, Bybit, Gate.io, and Bitget. Hamster Kombat has created the largest airdrop user base to date, but like the aftermath of other large airdrops, community skepticism is rife. Many users reported that after diligently clicking for months, they received tokens worth only 1 dollar, while images circulating showed many obvious bots receiving large amounts of tokens. Are hard-working users once again being used to benefit the project team? And who are the real winners behind this airdrop feast involving over a hundred million users? With a substantial accumulation of users, the distribution of the airdrop has become the biggest challenge for Hamster Kombat. Previous large airdrops, such as Jupiter and Zksync, had user numbers in the millions, with very few exceeding ten million. Particularly for a project like Hamster Kombat, there was no design for any anti-bot mechanism in the early stages, leading to a large number of bot farms participating. If the mechanism to identify bots fails, it will hurt many real users. According to the results, Hamster Kombat's official claim of reaching 300 million users ultimately resulted in 131 million eligible users for the airdrop, with approximately 2.30 million bot addresses identified. The total issuance of the HMSTR token is 100 billion, with 60% allocated for this airdrop, resulting in a total airdrop quantity of 60 billion tokens. Based on 130 million users, the average airdrop amount per user is about 458 tokens, valued at approximately 3.20 dollars based on a price of 0.007 dollars per token. From the data, the market capitalization of HMSTR is approximately 440 million dollars, which is lower than the initial market cap of 640 million dollars for DOGS and also lower than the 1 billion dollar market cap for NOT at launch. This indicates that Hamster Kombat's market value has not received a premium despite its user base exceeding one hundred million; instead, due to the continuous postponement of airdrops and token listings, market interest in similar products has decreased. Therefore, the token value received by each user is relatively low. Consequently, the community has voiced significant dissatisfaction with this outcome. A user named @roe1527 complained on Twitter that after participating for 109 days, they only received tokens worth about 17 dollars that need to be unlocked in batches. @roe1527 concluded, "I may not care much about this airdrop, but we should respect the fruits of people's labor; it’s too dark, and the reputation will really stink." PANews also published an article after the airdrop rules were released, mentioning a player nicknamed Timbo who stated that he played the game almost from the start, spending about 4-5 hours daily for two months, earning about 500 tokens (only 3.5 dollars). Besides users, the project team, exchanges, and the TON blockchain are all winners of this massive airdrop. From the perspective of the TON blockchain, data shows that the number of TON blockchain addresses has increased by 30 million since September, a growth rate of about 50%. Additionally, the TON Foundation recently announced that the number of monthly active wallets reached 10 million, a new historical high. The exponential growth of TON's ecosystem data is primarily driven by the explosion of various mini-games, which had only 27 million addresses in early June. According to a report from Binance, as of September 12, the number of Hamster Kombat links to TON wallets reached 55 million. Such a large number of users likely brought considerable advertising revenue to Hamster Kombat. Currently, Hamster Kombat's TG channel has about 60 million subscribers, its YouTube account has approximately 37.60 million subscribers, and its Twitter account has 14.20 million followers. Such immense traffic represents monetizable assets on any platform. Hamster Kombat's official TG channel began accepting advertising early on. Based on Telegram's CPM (cost per thousand impressions) of at least 2 euros, and with the latest Hamster Kombat advertisement having 50 million views, the revenue from a single advertisement should be at least 100,000 euros, not to mention that nearly daily advertisements are pushed in the Hamster Kombat channel, potentially reaching tens of millions of dollars in revenue. In addition to the project team and the TON ecosystem, this airdrop has also sparked a battle among exchanges for users, similar to the previous DOGS incident. Exchanges including Binance, OKX, HashKey Global, and Bitget have launched trading or airdrop activities targeting the HMSTR token. In this round of capital competition, Binance emerged as the biggest winner. As of September 27, Binance's HMSTR holdings accounted for approximately 18%, the highest among all exchanges, followed closely by Bybit and OKX. According to CMC data, HMSTR's trading volume exceeded 1 billion dollars in the last 24 hours, ranking 12th among all tokens, with Binance's trading volume accounting for nearly half, becoming the largest market for HMSTR after the airdrop. However, how many new users Hamster Kombat has brought to the exchanges remains unknown. Previously, Bybit founder Ben Zhou also predicted that the user acquisition effect of Hamster might start to decline.From on-chain data, there are only 214 thousand addresses holding the HMSTR token. 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 notable background. PANews was one of the first media outlets in the Chinese community to report on the game. In May of this year, when PANews took notice of the game, there was hardly any discussion on Twitter. At that time, driven by Notcoin, the TON ecosystem saw the emergence of several click-based mini-games that gained decent traffic thanks to Notcoin's traffic diversion, with Hamster Kombat being one of them. Other mini-games that also captured traffic during the same period as Hamster Kombat include Tapswap, Catizen, and others. In May, Hamster Kombat had 15 million users, which, while not as much as Tapswap (20 million users), saw its TG channel rank as the third largest globally. In the following months, Hamster Kombat claimed its user count reached 300 million, and currently, its TG channel subscription count stands at 69 million, making it the largest in the world. Looking back at the reasons behind Hamster Kombat's breakout, it may primarily stem from its relatively excellent gameplay. Unlike other clicker games, although Hamster Kombat also features coin-accumulating gameplay, as the game upgrades, the main gameplay shifts to simulating investment games with game coins. Essentially, Hamster Kombat is a virtual management game triggered by clicks, thus surpassing other competitors in terms of playability. Another reason for the rapid growth is the team and its clever traffic diversion methods. Within Hamster Kombat's game mechanics, there are also mechanisms for inviting friends and following social media accounts to earn points. The difference is that Hamster Kombat introduced a daily news program that hides large reward passwords within these programs. Players need to watch videos or search for passwords in social media comment sections. This not only caused a rapid increase in Hamster Kombat's social media follower count but also garnered a significant amount of real views, thus receiving more recommendations from social media platform algorithms. These algorithm recommendations may have played a crucial role in the subsequent traffic monetization for Hamster Kombat. Overall, the success of Hamster Kombat has opened new avenues for many projects. Instead of attracting users through high funding coupled with airdrop tactics, it lays a foundation of traffic through the playability of the game and airdrop expectations, maximizing the conversion of that traffic into monetizable assets (such as various social media accounts). However, compared to the previous airdrop gains that could reach thousands, this distribution method of having many people but few rewards may not gain recognition from those looking to exploit opportunities, and the airdrop feast may well be gone for good.

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