This Week in Crypto Games: 'Hamster Kombat' Airdrop and Expansion, $47 Million Gaming Scam

The crypto gaming space is busier than ever lately, what with prominent games starting to release, token airdrops piling up, and a seemingly constant array of other things happening at all times. It’s a lot to take in!

Luckily, Decrypt’s GG is all over it. And if you need a quick way to get caught up on the latest moves around crypto video games, we’re happy to present This Week in Crypto Games.

Our weekend roundup serves up the biggest news from the past week, along with a few other tidbits you might have missed. We also showcase a few of our original stories from the week.

Biggest news

Hamster Kombat airdrop: Ultra-viral Telegram mini-app Hamster Kombat launched its HMSTR token on The Open Network (TON) on Thursday. The tap-to-earn game attracted over 300 million users, with 131 million of those being eligible for the airdrop—though an additional 2.3 million were cut for cheating.

But not everyone was happy with the “free money.” Several players described their HMSTR reward as “dust” as its token price fell to as low as $0.006—pre-market trading predicted its price to be $0.095 the day before the airdrop. But traders still were all over the drop, with more than $1.2 billion worth trading hands in the first 24 hours. And TON held up, despite concerns.

Ahead of the airdrop, Hamster Kombat revealed its roadmap for the upcoming year. The anonymous team plans to release NFTs, create and launch new games, and most notably start to distance itself from Telegram exclusivity.

Its first step in doing this will be creating a progressive web app (PWA) for iOS, Android, and desktop—PWAs are websites that behave like regular apps. Months later, the team will look to move away from the PWA by directly integrating Hamster Kombat into desktop games.

$47M gaming scam: Binance assisted Indian law enforcement in arresting four individuals suspected of defrauding victims of $47.6 million and then laundering the funds. This was linked to the Fiewin online betting and gaming app, which promised users easy earnings but ultimately trapped their funds, not allowing users to withdraw their money.

The investigation found that the app froze accounts once significant funds had been accumulated, then transferred them through various cryptocurrency wallets to make it more challenging to trace the transactions. However, Binance’s Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) provided technical expertise to trace the movement of funds.