‘Hamster Kombat’ and ‘Catizen’ Telegram Token Demand Could Disrupt TON, Devs Warn

Telegram’s tap-to-earn games have taken the crypto world by storm, bringing hundreds of millions of prospective new users to The Open Network (TON). But a flood of Hamster Kombat and Catizen players attempting to claim their reward tokens later this month may not be all good news for the network, TON developers warned this week.

TON will “undoubtedly face more technical pressures and possibly some unforeseen issues,” the TON Core team wrote Tuesday in an official Telegram channel. The warning comes as the network contends with recent service outages precipitated by an explosion in tap-to-earn gaming and mini app activity tied to messaging app Telegram.

Daily active user addresses have hit 1.1 million several times on TON within the past two weeks, with single-day transactions peaking at 14.4 million ahead of upcoming airdrops for popular tap-to-earn games such as Hamster Kombat and Catizen, according to developers.

Catizen, which has attracted approximately 35 million players to its Telegram app and will offer claimable tokens to at least 15 million of them based on the latest estimate, will launch its CATI token on September 20.

Hamster Kombat, meanwhile, has attracted a vastly larger number of players: Over 300 million as of late July, the developers claimed, with Telegram in-app data showing nearly 86 million active users in the last month alone. The team has said that all players will be eligible for the HMSTR token airdrop on TON when it arrives on September 26.

“These levels of user engagement were unimaginable in Web3 before,” TON Core developers wrote in the Telegram channel post.

TON’s surge in user activity fueled by the Telegram gaming craze recently created outages on the layer-1 network. Last month, block processing on the network stopped for several hours two times in a single week.

The crux of the issue, according to TON developers, was a surge in user demand tied to distributions of DOGS, a meme coin project inspired by a dog drawing from Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov. The DOGS token is held by 4.5M unique wallets on TON, they said.

Service disruptions on TON could intensify again ahead of those and other upcoming game-related airdrops on the platform. Both events will likely lead to a spike in activity on TON as recipients try to claim their rewards.

But in the lead up to those airdrops, TON developers have promised to stay on top of any network issues, and attempt to overcome any roadblocks.

“We are unwavering in our commitment to building and addressing these challenges as we move toward mass adoption,” they wrote in the Telegram post.

Edited by Andrew Hayward