Mass adoption or mania? The big questions for Hamster Kombat

Every bull market spawns faddish, dubious trends on which some still manage to profit. In 2021 it was NFT fever; in the current cycle, meme tokens.

Clicker games have begun to vie with them for attention, led by the hyped Notcoin, which listed in May.

A new leader has now emerged: Hamster Kombat, which has inspired a blizzard of memes and jokey videos. Here are its quirks, upsides and drawbacks—the game even your grandmother has heard of.

What is Hamster Kombat

Hamster Kombat is a Telegram mini‑app in which players tap a hamster image to earn virtual coins. It works only in the messenger’s mobile version.

There are no in‑app purchases; users spend only their time. They are offered the role of CEO of a crypto exchange and tasked with making it a success. You can even pick one of the largest trading platforms, though the choice changes nothing. There is no storyline. The core loop is tapping the hamster and upgrading cards.

In the first tab, Exchange, the user sees their character, which can be levelled up to 10 (top left) by accumulating coins. For example, level five (Diamond) requires 1m units and level nine (Grandmaster) 100m. For now, levels merely change the character’s appearance and move the player into another league.

On the same screen sits the main metric—profit per hour. Bottom left of the hamster is energy, which depletes with taps and regenerates at three units per second. You cannot tap indefinitely.

Bottom right is Boost. Here you can spend coins to increase profit per tap, expand your energy pool and trigger a free full energy refill—but no more than once an hour and only six times a day.

The second tab, Mine, contains all player cards that increase profit per hour. They are split into four categories, each easing newcomers into crypto.

For instance, the Markets section mentions staking, shitcoins, fan tokens, DeFi 2.0, GameFi, DAOs, margin trading, trading bots and more. In PR&Team you can upgrade cards for X, TikTok, CoinDesk and Cointelegraph; in Legal you encounter KYC, AML, the SEC and obtain licences in various regions and countries.

The most valuable options are in Specials. Some cards are tied to specific events—for example, the Notcoin listing, the addition of USDT to the TON network, Pavel Durov’s interview with American journalist Tucker Carlson, Bitcoin Pizza Day, various conferences and more.

The third tab holds a referral link to invite friends and describes the rewards. The fourth offers simple tasks (pick an exchange, follow social networks, watch a video) to earn coins. The fifth will later host missions for the airdrop.

Hamster Kombat’s listing timeline

According to the roadmap on the project’s official website, developers plan to add a pre‑listing Web3 quest in June. A Token Generation Event is slated for July, which is usually followed by a listing.

Even so, the Hamster Kombat team has not given even rough dates for tokens to appear on exchanges. The starting price is also unknown. The project’s tokenomics cannot be reviewed in a white paper—the button on the website is inactive and the document is not publicly available.

On 6 June the developers said the airdrop will depend on the “profit per hour” metric rather than the coin balance. They will also take into account “some other activity parameters”, to be disclosed later.

Despite users’ expectations and the frenzy around the game, Hamster Kombat has never guaranteed players an income. The project rode Notcoin’s popularity but may not repeat its listing outcome.

Web3 entrepreneur Vladimir Menaskop told ForkLog the project is preparing a listing at a favourable moment.

“HMSTR is baked‑in hyperinflation. Whether any exchange needs it, I do not know, but the time of meme tokens has certainly not passed yet, and the TON ecosystem is in the top ten by various indicators,” he believes.

HAPI’s CCO Mark Letsiuk thinks compliance could hinder a listing on Binance, Coinbase and Kraken. To reach the largest exchanges, the project will need to undergo serious legal scrutiny.

“I do not think they will refuse to conduct an airdrop, otherwise the whole segment will immediately lose faith. If the largest project after Notcoin refuses an airdrop, then the entire industry of Telegram tappers will wobble, just as the ZKsync and LayerZero cases have spoiled the picture in the retrodrop segment,” the expert said.

At the same time, Letsiuk is sure that because of the abundance of bots each player will receive less than in Notcoin.

“HMSTR will not be worth more than NOT, because Notcoin is a more trusted project that Telegram itself supported. I believe they will carry out an airdrop, but people will be a little disappointed. Everyone will take off their rose‑tinted glasses and stop hoping they can poke the screen with ten accounts and get $300–500 on each,” HAPI’s CCO added.

Who created Hamster Kombat

The game’s creators remain anonymous and communicate with the audience as hamsters. Journalists, however, have found they may be linked to Russia.

According to The Bell, Russian IT entrepreneur Eduard Gurinovich had a hand in creating the game. Earlier, the Telegram channel “Zhaba i gadyuka” noted that on 14 March, along with the project’s main domain, an additional one—hamsterkombat.com—was registered.

The email used in registration—ap@arenum.games—belongs to the Cypriot company Arenum ltd., whose shareholders include Russian entrepreneurs Eduard Gurinovich, Alexander Zelenishchikov and Alexander Pasechnik.

Another argument in themed chats for the Russia‑based origin theory is the appearance of project merch on the Russian marketplace Ozon.

According to Menaskop, the creators’ anonymity is not a major problem.

“There are plenty of anonymous projects in crypto: from Bitcoin to YFI and others. I often use DeFi, and there every fifth to seventh project is anonymous. Anonymity is great—but when it comes together with decentralisation and openness. Another kind of anonymity is poison,” he explained.

HAPI’s CCO agrees. In a comment to ForkLog he called anonymity “fairly illusory in modern Web3”, since identifying a project’s creators would not be hard, though he doubted there would be demand to do so.

Scammers are hunting the “hamsters”

Although Hamster Kombat does not yet allow withdrawals of in‑game coins, analysts have already warned of scammers.

Researchers at F.A.C.C.T. found around 200 resources offering to mediate crediting currency to a TON wallet by linking it to the app. This gives attackers full control over a user’s assets.

Another scheme is mass‑mailing phishing links that supposedly log users into Telegram and launch the Hamster Kombat bot. Following them leads to account takeovers.

Hamster Kombat players can also be duped by paid offers to “boost” referrals. Scammers take the money and vanish without delivering.

Experts polled by ForkLog agreed that the main threat to Hamster Kombat users is phishing.

“The audience is unprepared and used to clicking on everything. And what is phishing? It is when they buy a spam database, send it to millions of addresses and wait for people to follow a link and give something up: whether that is funds from a TON wallet or card details is another question,” Menaskop explained.

The Web3 entrepreneur also envisaged user losses after a listing.

“You can always end up on a fake bot—a phishing tapper. But mainly, by tapping the screen, you lose the most precious resource—time. I am not even talking about bot farms; some people register many accounts on each device, log in every hour, set alarms. After two months a person will receive about $10 on each account and will not recoup their time,” HAPI’s CCO noted.

Money from thin air, or another gold rush?

On 24 June the Hamster Kombat team reported reaching 200m players. There is no way to verify this, but heated social‑media chatter and large audiences on several platforms attest to its popularity.

At the time of writing, the game’s Telegram channel has 46m subscribers; its YouTube account, 29.3m; and its X account, 10.2m.

Beyond Hamster Kombat, other clickers are gaining steam: Blum, Catizen, MemeFi, TapSwap. On 24 June Pavel Durov mentioned the last of these in his Telegram channel.

Active crypto users probably did not imagine mass adoption would look like this. Yet Hamster Kombat is genuinely connected to the industry: it offers wallet linking and intends to run an airdrop and list a token.

It has also taken on an educational mission, introducing crypto newcomers to complex, sprawling terminology through play.

At this stage it is hard to predict where the craze goes. Some may make tidy sums from a simple game. Equally, there may be no listing—or players may receive trifling amounts. Some have surely already been scammed.

Either way, the creators will earn the most—and in a couple of years we will smile, recalling yet another bout of crypto fever.