“Do you tap your hamster?” — is a question you’ve probably been asked as you read this article. Millions of users are tapping and tapping, promoting their hamster on the career ladder and at the same time wondering if they can make money with it.
Market experts are trying to analyze the development of such projects, with stunning speed and worldwide popularity. And they definitely pay tribute to them as a tool that so easily managed to attract in one fell swoop a huge number of newcomers to the cryptocurrency sector.
Let’s discuss what the TON blockchain digital tappers are that have made so much noise, and whether there is an opportunity for the participants of the hype to make a profit for their work and time.
Battle of the Hamsters. How millions are trying to make money from the game
Hamster Kombat is a gaming Web3 crypto project (T2E, tap-to-earn) that works as a mini-app in Telegram. Players are encouraged to earn achievements by clicking on a picture of a hamster.
The gameplay is primitive yet addictive (it doesn’t let go, motivating users to keep coming back to the game). Players act as the CEO of Hamster, a virtual cryptocurrency exchange. The only thing that changes during the game is the number of coins earned and the appearance of the hamster on the screen. The higher the development of the Hamster player (nine levels are offered), the more presentable he looks: new style and environment elements appear. All you have to do is tap the screen and earn Hamster Coins by spending energy, which is replenished relatively quickly. Each tap replenishes the player’s virtual exchange, which can be upgraded over time by purchasing in-game NFTs. The game regularly offers digital collectibles that can be combined into collectibles (such as daily combo cards).
Players expect that, over time, their achievements will be converted into the project’s cryptocurrency, which can be bought and sold on decentralized exchanges, earning them income.
“Battle of the Hamsters” was launched in late March this year, and in late May the development team announced the release of tokens under the ticker HMSTR on the TON blockchain. In the roadmap provided on the Hamster Kombat website, the release is scheduled for July 2024. According to the developers, gameplay will not stop before or after the listing (after which many more improvements and updates are planned). Cryptocurrency exchanges KuCoin, Gate.io, Bybit and Bitget have already announced a pre-market for HMSTR trading.
Who is behind the development of Hamster Kombat is a mystery shrouded in darkness, just as little is known about who is behind the funding. Most sources tend to believe that the project has Russian roots in the person of IT entrepreneur Eduard Gurinovich. Telegram, on the other hand, is one of the beneficiaries. The one-page official website contains only links to social networks, the chatbot itself, and a roadmap without much detail. The domain of the game site is registered in Russia, and information about who owns the address is closed.
On July 4, Pavel Durov wrote on his TG page that the number of users of the mini-application reached 239 million three months after its launch. According to him, Hamster Kombat shows a daily growth of 4-5 million new users, making it the fastest growing digital service in the world. The messenger founder said that Hamster Kombat is just the beginning of the coming wave, demonstrating Telegram’s huge potential as a platform for mini-applications.
One of the factors behind such rapid audience growth is the exchange of referral links – users receive bonus coins for doing so. Also, many players create multiple accounts or play from multiple devices in order to earn more virtual currency. So it’s hard to say exactly how many people actually play Hamster Kombat, but the fact is that it’s very popular.
More about Clickers on Telegram
Millions of users who only knew about crypto by hearsay have become real fans of “clickers”. Clickers are the games in the format of Telegram bots, in which the user is required to click on an interface object on the smartphone screen (it can be a coin, a kitten, a flower, a hamster, or anything else, depending on the theme of the game). The more clicks — the bigger the bonus. Tappers existed before the Telegram boom we saw this year, but they didn’t offer anything in return. Hamster Kombat, like other projects on TON, offers virtual coins as a reward, which can be converted into real money over time.
Notcoin
Hamster Kombat uses the positive experience and advantages of Notcoin in its development — a game project that was also launched on the TON blockchain a few months earlier — on January 1, 2024. Notecoin, in which you have to click on a coin, attracted more than 4 million users within the first week. And by the time Notcoin was listed in May 2024, the ecosystem had about 11.5 million token holders. At the time of writing, the market capitalization of Notcoin is about $1.6 billion.
The project continues its development, which inspires investors with greater confidence in the correctness of the choice made. In July 2024, the developers announced a partnership with 1inch and Sign to create a Triangle accelerator for the development of Telegram and TON ecosystems. Sasha Plotvinov, the creator of Notcoin, believes that there is no future for pure clickers, so he and his team of developers want to create a more sustainable model. Sasha plans to transform the project into a full-fledged decentralized ecosystem within the next four years.
TapSwap
This is another bright debutant in the clicker segment. This mini-app in Telegram also offers the prospect of earning income in TAPS coins for various game achievements. At the beginning of July, the project had more than 60 million users. Pavel Durov noted that the game reached such an impressive number of participants without any special marketing efforts.
Major
Major Bot, released in July 2024, is one of the most specific fresh examples of game projects. It encourages you to increase your ranking by investing money (!!!) to improve your position or attract new participants. That’s it — there’s nothing else in it. The process involves a standard user profile whose rating can be increased using Telegram Stars (Telegram’s new internal currency) or by performing tasks (inviting friends or subscribing to channels).
Notably, Major’s design uses elements of Telegram’s identity (duckies, etc.), but Pavel Durov has not yet commented on the bot’s launch or progress. While the successes of Hamster Kombat he regularly records in messages.
How Clickers work in Telegram
Integration with The Open Network (TON) blockchain is one of the determining factors behind the popularity of these games among the Telegram community, as they offer high throughput and security for cryptocurrency transactions enabled by blockchain technology. The large user base increases the value of NFTs in clickers due to potentially high demand, although it is difficult to call them “digital art”.
Telegram’s unique digital games are available on a special decentralized platform called Telegram Apps Center (tApps Center), which hosts applications for various purposes created for the messenger on the blockchain. Smart contracts on TON ensure that applications are directly integrated into the messenger, while offering functionality directly linked to the user’s account. And of course, they guarantee the security of digital assets and execute transactions with their own smart contracts.
Marketplaces on TON are also widely used for trading digital taps (selling or buying upgrades and NFTs). Decentralized marketplaces on other blockchains are also gradually integrating such transactions into their services.
Promising clickers that take full advantage of the TON blockchain are also considered:
Where’s the money?
Such cryptocurrency-related projects seem more than questionable at first glance. They do not require any special skills from the participants, except the ability to “tap” or “click”, but still offer the opportunity to earn. And today millions of Telegram users click on a hamster to be rewarded at the end of the week or month with a “generous bonus in TONS” starting from August 2024 (such information is included in the guide to working with the bot). And the top 10 participants will receive “something special”. Also, rating stars can be “converted into a valuable token” in the future.
That is, the developers, who do not reveal their identity, except for verbal promises for the abstract future, do not guarantee income to participants in any way. The audience is growing, and it is clear that the creators will not be left in the lurch: they get an audience of millions, which is successfully sold to third-party advertisers in the game itself and in the social networks of the projects.
And what about the players? The answer is simple – just rely on Notcoin’s previous success and your own luck. After all, so far only Sasha Plotnikov and his team have managed to keep their promise to enter the crypto exchange. And experts do not get tired of asking questions about how, for example, the Major bot, which is not known who is behind it, manages to get real money from participants right from the start. So far we only know that it is some Roxman, who is even surprised that the project he launched is so successful (he publishes information about Major in his channel in Telegram, where, by the way, he has more than 2 million subscribers at the time of writing this article).
Conclusion
We can see that today users have only a theoretical possibility to convert their gaming successes into real money by participating in new games: only Notcoin has provided users with such an opportunity, and the prospects for other similar projects are currently more than vague.
Be that as it may, games like Hamster Kombat have “torn” the market with their overwhelming success and undoubtedly serve the future of digital assets and the development of the cryptocurrency sector due to the huge influx of new users.
And if the expectations of users will not be deceived, we will witness the further development of tappers on the TON blockchain and other decentralized networks.
Thank you for your attention. Earn safely and with pleasure!
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