In past lives I have been an urban planner, a crime boss, and the CEO of a thriving cryptocurrency exchange. On Telegram, obviously. Why I like work cosplay is a question for my therapist. But it’s fascinating how many Web3 games explore these roles in real life. And it’s great that the rewards are starting to be more worth the bragging rights among your friends.

I wasted endless amounts of time building my Sims’ town in the early 2000s, where I turned a small village into a bustling metropolis on my underpowered Windows95 desktop. I had to think about energy management and food supply routes and whether or not a stadium was necessary for tax revenue to support some other park.

Fast forward to 2009 and I’m living my best Tony Soprano life with two baseball bats, a Tommy Gun, and enough property to make me 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 Facebook’s recommendation feed. The fact that you could see the moves your friends were making made you want to play the game, and the exponential effect just kept going round and round.

Until Facebook put a stop to the category, reducing external notifications, taxing virtual objects and giving priority to its own features over those of third parties.

Telegram has learned some lessons from the original social media platforms and added new ways of gamification that appeal to the insatiable gambler mentality of the cryptocurrency public. Telegram, which has 900 million monthly users, is proving that gaming could become 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 counted one hundred thousand users on the nascent platform.

Today, that number is approaching a billion, and while it’s not fully decentralized, its mix of advanced cryptography and distributed storage security make it a favorite among the crypto community. And that was before Hamster Kombat hit the platform.

There have been numerous Telegram crypto bots to date: services like Meme and Gif creators, GitHub notification bots, Gmail and Spotify integrations. One type of application that the cryptocurrency public is particularly interested in is gamification. From BonkBotwhich allowed the simple and very fast launch of cryptocurrencies during the recent memecoin season from Solana to Notcoin, which has collected a success $1 billion in FDV after 35 million players grind on Telegram-based gaming from January to April. Clear lesson: Utility plus fun, plus encryption, works well on messaging app. A hamster comes calling

The latest competitor to catch fire in this scheme is Hamster Kombat. In just over four weeks, the app has grown to over 8 million players, with more than 3 million playing every day.

The premise of Hamster Kombat is pretty simple. You are the CEO of a cryptocurrency exchange of your choice (Binance, OKX, MEXC and others). At the beginning, all you have to do is tap the hamster on the screen to start earning points. As soon as the available points run out, they start counting again, encouraging you to come back and tap more.

Once you have accumulated enough, you, as the CEO, can start putting your currency to work. You can invest your points in BTC and ETH pairs getting hourly returns. You can spend on CoinTelegraph (or CoinDesk, if you get to level 10) or to improve your KYC or AML security. Each choice returns you more hourly profits so you can now earn passively and put more currency to work growing your imaginary exchange.

From a marketing perspective, the more you share with friends, the more you join 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 of whom play via links I’ve shared with them, which gives me more currency to use to grow my empire.

Hamster Kombat allows partners to purchase “cards” and players to take actions and earn more currency every hour. Joining a partner Telegram channel can cost 15,000 points. But it pays off at 3000 points per hour, making it something that “pays for itself” in 5 hours of active involvement in the game. This partner, a new gaming blockchain, saw its Telegram subscribers increase to over 1.2 million people in just days after launching with Hamster Kombat, incredibly rapid onboarding of new users into an ecosystem where the attention and users are in high demand. That’s when 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 25 this year and it took just 11 days to reach 1 million players. Since then, it has surpassed 8 million players and, according to it, 2.8 million users play every day with an average usage time of 52 minutes per day. Pretty disconcerting for a new game tied directly to a social media platform.

When asked about the game’s genesis, Anufriev gave credit to a decade-old game called USA Simulator, an iOS/Android game from the mid-2010s in which you play as a politician with the stated goal of “Developing your country, extend the sphere of influence and lead the country to world domination!.” He said the founders were inspired by the game and reframed it specifically for the cryptocurrency industry and let users put themselves in the shoes of CZ (Binance) or Brian Armstrong (Coinbase).

“The viral effect started from 3 [shares per player] and now we are closer to 15,” Anufriev said. “The mechanics of the game, like a new card, pushes you to invite friends and we have seen this problem in some regions where too many influencers have started promoting it and normal people don’t have enough people to invite.” Anufriev’s team was targeting an audience of influencers 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 that audience,” he notes.

Telegram’s TON (Telegram Open Network), Telegram’s Layer-1 Blockchain, has recently seen serious adoption, and TON the token grew with it. But Anufriev said the project will issue its token on the Binance Smart Chain, with the end of May as the expected release date.

Nikita Anufriev and many other Hamster players will come Consensus 2024 and we’ll see if this reward-seeking community will also unite in real life or if they will prefer to be an anonymous player from behind a screen. For now, Telegram appears to be a place that anyone in the cryptocurrency world looking to build an audience should pay attention to.

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