Bitcoin
Telegram social games bring millions into crypto
In past lives, I was an urban planner, a crime boss, and the CEO of a thriving cryptocurrency exchange. On Telegram, of course. Why I like professional cosplay is a question for my therapist. But it’s fascinating how many Web3 games explore these real-life roles. And it’s great that the rewards are starting to be worth more bragging rights among your friends.
I spent a lot of time building my Sims’ town in the early 2000s, where I turned a small village into a bustling metropolis on my low-powered Windows95 desktop. I had to think about energy management and food supply routes and whether or not a stadium was needed to get tax revenue to support a few more parks.
Fast forward to 2009, and I’m living my best Tony Soprano life with two baseball bats, a Tommy Gun, and enough property to earn one hundred and seven thousand dollars every 54 minutes in virtual currency. What “Mob Wars” had that The Sims didn’t was the network effect power of the Facebook recommendation feed. The fact that you could see the moves your friends were making made you want to join the game, and the exponential effect just kept rolling and rolling.
Until Facebook crushed the category by repressing external notifications, taxing virtual items and prioritizing its own resources over those of third parties.
Telegram has learned some lessons from the original social media platforms and added new gamification modes that appeal to the insatiable gamer mentality of the crypto crowd. Telegram, which has 900 million monthly users, is proving that gaming can be the next big player/customer acquisition platform to help grow a blockchain-based business.
Telegram Messenger has been around for over ten years. Brothers Nikolai and Pavel Durov created the encrypted messaging platform in 2013 and soon after had one hundred thousand users on the nascent platform.
Today, that number is approaching a billion, and although it is not fully decentralized, its combination of strong encryption and distributed storage security makes it a favorite among the crypto community. And that was before Hamster Kombat arrived on the platform.
To date, there are several crypto Telegram bots: services like Meme and Gif creators, GitHub notification bots, integrations with Gmail and Spotify. One type of application that the crypto crowd has particularly embraced is gamification. In BonkBotwhich enabled simple and hyper-fast crypto exchange during the recent memecoin season Solana to Notcoin, which accumulated a $1 billion in FDV after 35 million players eliminated in the Telegram-based game from January to April. Clear lesson: utility and fun, plus encryption, work well in the messaging app. A hamster comes calling
The most recent entrant to catch fire in this scheme is Hamster Kombat. In just over four weeks, the app has grown to over 8 million players, with over 3 million playing daily.
The premise of Hamster Kombat is pretty straightforward. You are the CEO of a cryptocurrency exchange of your choice (Binance, OKX, MEXC and others). At first, just tap the hamster on the screen to start earning some points. Once the available points are exhausted, they start counting again, encouraging you to come back and tap for more.
Once you have accumulated enough, you as the CEO can start putting your coin to work. You can stake your points into BTC and ETH pairs, generating hourly returns. You can spend it on CoinTelegraph (or CoinDesk if you get to level 10) or on improving your KYC or AML security. Each pick brings back more profits per hour, so you can now earn passively and put more currency to work to grow your dummy exchange.
From a marketing perspective, the more you share with friends, the more you participate in connected channels, the more you earn to grow your business, the better. Hence the SocialFi overlay that makes the game so viral. I have seven friends, all playing through links I shared with them, which gives me more money to invest in growing my empire.
Hamster Kombat allows partners to buy “cards” and players to perform actions and earn more currency per hour. Joining a Telegram partner channel can cost 15,000 points. But it pays 3,000 points per hour, making it something that “paid for itself” in 5 hours of active involvement with the game. This partner, a new gaming blockchain, saw its Telegram subscribers increase to over 1.2 million people in just a few days after launching with Hamster Kombat, an incredibly fast onboarding of new users into an ecosystem where attention and users are in high demand. It was then that I felt the need to reach out and investigate what their special sauce is.
I contacted Nikita Anufriev, marketing consultant for Hamster Kombat and host of a popular Russian-language program crypto channel on Youtube. Anufriev confirmed that the project was launched on March 25th this year and took just 11 days to reach 1 million players. It has since surpassed 8 million players, and claimed that 2.8 million users play daily with an average usage time of 52 minutes per day. Pretty surprising for a new game tied directly to a social media platform.
When asked about the game’s genesis, Anufriev gave credit to a ten-year-old game called USA Simulator, an iOS/Android game from the mid-2010s where you play as a politician with the stated goal of “Developing your country, expanding the sphere of influence and lead the country to world domination!.” He said the founders took inspiration from the game and revamped it to be specifically about the crypto industry and allowed users to put themselves in the shoes of CZ (Binance) or Brian Armstrong (Coinbase).
“The viral effect started from 3 [shares per player] and now it is close to 15,” said Anufriev. “Game mechanics like a new card encourage you to invite friends and we’ve seen this issue in certain regions where too many influencers have started promoting it and regular people don’t have enough people to invite.” Anufriev’s team targeted an influencer audience for the first few hundred thousand users, but then the network effect took over. “Telegram is very popular among cryptocurrency users and is the number one messaging app for this audience,” he notes.
Telegram’s TON (Telegram Open Network), Telegram’s Layer-1 Blockchain, has seen serious adoption recently, and TON token has increased with it. But Anufriev said the project will issue its token on the Binance Smart Chain, with a launch date scheduled for the end of May.
Nikita Anufriev and many other Hamster players will come to Consensus 2024 and we’ll see if this reward-seeking community will also come together in real life or if they’d rather be an anonymous player behind a screen. For now, Telegram appears to be a place that anyone in crypto looking to build an audience should pay attention to.