In past lives, I've been a city planner, a crime boss, and the CEO of a thriving cryptocurrency exchange. On Telegram, that is. Why I enjoy cosplaying as a job is a question for my therapist. But it's interesting to see more Web3 games exploring these real-life roles, and it's great that the rewards are starting to become more bragging-worthy among friends.
I spent endless hours building Sims Town in the early 2000s. There, he grew a small village into a bustling metropolis on a weak Windows95 desktop. We had to think about power management, food supply routes, and whether we needed a stadium to generate tax revenue to support some parks.
Fast forward to 2009, and I'm living my best Tony Soprano life with two baseball bats, a Tommy gun, and enough money to make $170,000 every 54 minutes in cryptocurrency. What Mob Wars had that The Sims didn't was the power of network effects in the Facebook Recommendations feed. When you see your friends moving, you want to join in the game too, and the exponential effect continues to spread.
Until Facebook killed the category by cracking down on external notifications and taxes on virtual items and prioritizing its own features over third-party features.
Telegram has learned some lessons from its original social media platform and added a new gamification mode that appeals to the insatiable gambler mindset of the crypto crowd. With 900 million monthly users, Telegram is proving that gaming can be the next big player/customer acquisition platform to help blockchain-powered businesses grow.
Telegram Messenger has been around for over 10 years. Brothers Nikolai and Pavel Durov created the encrypted messaging platform in 2013, and soon after, on its initial platform he counted 100,000 users.
Today, that number is approaching 1 billion, and while it is not fully decentralized, its combination of strong cryptography and decentralized storage security has made it popular among the cryptocurrency community. That was before Hamster Kombat came to the platform.
A number of Telegram crypto bots have appeared over the years, from services like Meme and Gif makers to GitHub notification bots and Gmail and Spotify integrations. One of the application types that the crypto audience is particularly interested in is gamification.from BonkbotThis made it possible to switch to Notcoin for a simple and super-fast cryptocurrency during the recent Solana memecoin season. 35 million players participated, resulting in FDV reaching $1 billion In Telegram based games from January to April. A clear lesson: Practicality, fun, and crypto work well in messaging apps.the hamster is calling
A recent addition to this schema is Hamster Kombat. In just four weeks, the app has surpassed 8 million players, with over 3 million people playing every day.
The premise of Hamster Kombat is very simple. You are the CEO of your chosen cryptocurrency exchange (Binance, OKX, MEXC, etc.). At first, you can earn points by simply tapping the hamster on the screen. As soon as there are no more points available, it will start counting up again, prompting you to go back and tap more.
Once you have accumulated enough money, you can start leveraging your currency as a CEO. When you put your points into his BTC and ETH pair, you get hourly returns. You can spend it on CoinTelegraph (or CoinDesk if you reach level 10) or on increasing your KYC or AML security. Each choice will return you more profit per hour, allowing you to passively earn and spend more currency to grow your fictitious exchange.
From a marketing perspective, the more you share with your friends, the more you participate in connected channels, the more money you can earn to grow your business, the better. Therefore, it is his SocialFi overlay that makes the game so popular. I have 7 friends who all play through a shared link, which gives him more currency to deploy to expand his empire.
In Hamster Kombat, partners buy “cards” that allow players to take actions and earn more currency per hour. Joining a partner's Telegram channel can cost 15,000 points. However, each hour will set him back 3,000 points, so 5 hours of active participation in the game will “pay for itself”. A new game on his blockchain, this partner increased his Telegram subscribers to more than 1.2 million in just a few days after launching Hamster Kombat. This is incredibly fast onboarding of new users in an ecosystem with high attention and user demand. That's when I felt I needed to investigate what their signature sauce was.
We reached out to Nikita Anufriev, Hamster Kombat's marketing advisor and popular Russian-language host. YouTube crypto channel. Anufriev admitted that this project was launched on March 25th of this year and it took him just 11 days for the number of players to reach his 1 million. Since then, the number of players has surpassed his 8 million, he said, with 2.8 million users playing daily and the average usage time per day being 52 minutes. Pretty amazing for a new game tied directly to a social media platform.
When asked about the origins of the game, Anufriev credited a 10-year-old game called USA Simulator. This game is his mid-2010s iOS/Android game in which you play as a politician with the goal of “developing the country and expanding the scope of the nation.” Influence this country and lead it to world domination! He said the founders were inspired by the game and restructured it specifically for the cryptocurrency industry, putting users in the shoes of CZ (Binance) and Brian Armstrong (Coinbase). It is said that he did.
“The viral effect started at 3 [shares per player] And now it is approaching 15,” Anufriev said. “In-game mechanics like new cards encourage you to invite friends, but we've encountered this issue in certain regions. Too many influencers have started promoting this issue, and the general public can't invite them. Anufriev's team targeted influencers for the first few hundred thousand users, but then network effects took over. “Telegram is widely popular among crypto users and is the number one messenger app for them,” he points out.
Telegram's layer 1 blockchain, TON (Telegram Open Network), has recently been adopted in earnest and TON Tokens are also rising accordingly.. However, Anufriev said that the project will issue tokens on the Binance Smart Chain, with a target release date of the end of May.
Many hamster players will be in attendance, including Nikita Anufriev. consensus 2024 And we'll see if this reward-seeking community will participate in the real world, or if they prefer to remain anonymous players behind a screen. For now, Telegram seems to be one of the places everyone in the crypto industry should be looking at as they try to build an audience.
