‘Catizen’ Players Angry After Surprise Changes to Telegram Game Airdrop

Catizen’s path to its upcoming token launch on September 20 has been rocky, with players complaining about a previous delay and other moves. But now some players are up in arms again after the airdrop allocations were revealed, with developer Pluto Studio admitting to criteria changes that weren’t disclosed ahead of time.

Pluto revealed to players Saturday how many tokens they are set to receive when the Telegram game’s CATI token launches on The Open Network. The token isn’t yet live and players don’t know how much each token will be worth when it hits the market on September 20.

However, many players have expressed disappointment on Twitter (aka X) that their share of rewards was lower than expected. CATI will have a total supply of 1 billion tokens, with 305 million tokens circulating at launch—and some players who say they were grinding hard in the Telegram puzzle game thought they’d get a larger share of the pie.

“Rank 6,054 out of 36 million players but got only 39 CATI,” one player claimed. “How can someone call this fair distribution? We need transparency about the token allocation.”

Other players similarly complained of single-digit or double-digital CATI allocations in viral tweets, despite claiming to have played extensive amounts of the game. Quickly, the hashtag “#catizenscam” began trending across Twitter.

But the complaints aren’t only focused on the number of tokens allocated to players. They also came following changes to the token distribution model and allocation criteria that were not previously communicated.

Pluto had previously announced that 43% of the token supply would be given to the community—but Friday’s announcement that only about 30% of the supply would be circulating at launch raised plenty of questions among players.

Over the weekend, the developers clarified that 43% of the supply will be allocated to “airdrop and ecosystem,” but that the total includes the 90 million tokens (9% of total supply) being offered to Binance customers who stake coins via a Launchpool rewards campaign. That promotion was just announced on Friday.

Just 15% of the total supply (or 150 million tokens) will be used for the initial airdrop to players, with more granted as play-to-earn rewards in quarterly in-game seasons.

There’s a further change drawing scorn from some players. Previously, Catizen’s team said that players’ in-game vKitty earning rate—which is boosted by playing the cat-matching puzzle game—would be the primary determinant in airdrop allocations.

But early Sunday, after the airdrop allocations had been revealed to players, Pluto said that it had actually changed the design of the airdrop after discovering that some players had used means to artificially boost their earnings.

“During the data review for this CATI airdrop, we discovered that numerous bot accounts exploited this public rule by using scripts to boost their vKitty profit speed, attempting to gain a disproportionate amount of CATI tokens,” it wrote. “In this situation, following the original airdrop criterion would significantly undermine the benefits of genuine players and community supporters!”

As such, the airdrop criteria was shifted to minimize the vKitty profit speed, and instead focus on “factors that more accurately reflect genuine player activities, such as: on-chain interactions, task completions, and fish coin purchases and consumption.”

Because some of those criteria are based around spending money in the game—and Pluto had recently boasted of earning some $27 million from paying players—used unhappy with their airdrop allocations complained that Catizens team had executed a bait-and-switch at the expense of those who had invested time rather than money.

Decrypt reached out to Pluto Studio for comment on the complaints and changes, including why it did not instead ban players who had cheated rather than alter the criteria for all users—but did not receive an immediate response.