What Hamster Kombat Did: How Telegram Built a Web3 Gaming Juggernaut

With hundreds of millions of users, Telegram's TON, aka The Open Network, is building a head of steam in simple, addictive, fun games built on a blockchain.

Telegram’s TON Surges With Addictive Web3 Games

With hundreds of millions of users, Telegram’s TON, aka The Open Network, is building a head of steam in simple, addictive, fun games built on a blockchain.

Two months ago the president of Iran, Ebrahim Raisi, was killed in a helicopter crash. Iran held an election to replace him, but there was a hitch: According to a senior official in Iran’s military, the nation’s citizens were too distracted to properly vet the candidates. Millions of Iranians, supposedly, were too busy clicking on their phones.

They were hooked on a crypto game called “Hamster Kombat.”

This feature is part of CoinDesk's GameFi Theme Week.

The game seems to have come out of nowhere. In March, it launched on TON, aka The Open Network, a Web3 ecosystem built on Telegram. Now the game is so popular that Rear Admiral Habibollah Sayyari, Iran’s deputy chief of the military, accused it of being part of the West’s “soft war” on Iran’s government. As the AP reported, Sayyari said that “One of the features of the soft war by the enemy is the ‘Hamster’ game.”

So is the United States really weaponizing Web3 hamsters against Iran? It’s a fascinating (if wild) question, but in some ways the answer is irrelevant. The question’s very existence is what matters. “This has become so fucking big, even politicians started talking about it,” says Inal Kardan, Gaming Lead at the TON Foundation.

Hamster Kombat’s founder is anonymous; the project declined requests for an interview. (Clearly it’s the CIA.) But they claim to have over 200 million users; they have 11 million followers on Twitter/X, and their YouTube account has 31 million subscribers.

This is just one of several “GameFi” projects on TON with eye-popping growth. Web3 games are flourishing. The cute and cartoony “Catizen” (the sponsor of CoinDesk’s GameFi theme week] has over 23 million users. TON’s first big success story, “Notcoin,” has over 40 million.

In total, there are now 500 million users on the TON network, according to the foundation. With a current market cap of $19.4 billion, Toncoin has surged to become the eighth largest project in all of crypto -- leapfrogging mainstays like Polkadot, Cardano, and NEAR.

But the Iranian military isn’t grumbling about Polkadot or Cardano. TON games feel different. They’re simple and fun and it seems they’ve broken out of the crypto echo-chamber, finding a mainstream audience, a la NFTs in 2021. “This is not just about the degens,” says Kardan. “This is about normies doing something with blockchain for the very first time.”

One reason for the explosive growth of TON is the global reach of Telegram itself, especially in Europe and Asia. Telegram has over 900 million users. But as recently as December of 2023, according to Kardan, only 1% of them used Telegram to play games. Entrepreneurs sniffed an opportunity.

“We looked at Telegram and TON, and we thought, this is virgin land,” says Tim Wong, Chairman of Catizen Foundation. So games like Catizen, Notcoin, Yescoin, and Tapswap quickly filled the void, partly because they can be easily (even mindlessly) played while waiting for an elevator.

“All of them are hyper-causal, really simple games,” says Kardan. “That’s what people like.” The Telegram games are easy to install, easy to play, and easy to connect to crypto. (At least internationally--Telegram’s native crypto wallet is not available in the US, due to regulatory concerns.) For 15 years, the web3 space has been dogged by clunky interfaces and confusing protocols. TON seemed to have solved that overnight.

The buttery smooth UX is why DeFi analyst David Zimmerman wrote a research paper concluding that TON is “well-positioned to become crypto’s killer app,” as it has “done more to progress in these areas [UX and real-world use cases] than any other crypto market participant.” TON games are simple. In a phone interview, Zimmerman says that in all his years covering crypto, whenever he introduced his “normie friends” to Web3 projects, it would typically take a 40-minute tutorial filled with confused questions. With TON? He’s already onboarded 10 friends.

The games themselves are clever, appealing, fun. You can start playing Catizen in seconds, clicking on little kittens and watching coins magically appear (more on this later). You earn rewards for referring friends and sharing on social media --