300 Million Players Tapped for $2: The Hamster Kombat Craze, Durov's Arrest, and the Airdrop Disaster

1. A hamster CEO and a claimed 300 million players

Hamster Kombat describes itself, in its own whitepaper, as a crypto exchange CEO simulator built on Telegram, with a stated mission of onboarding one billion Web2 users into Web3. Players tap a cartoon hamster chief executive, upgrade cards that generate in-game profit per hour, and complete daily tasks, accumulating score in anticipation of a token airdrop on The Open Network, the blockchain most Telegram games have used.^[1][3]

The game launched on March 26, 2024, and its growth claims were unlike anything crypto had seen. On July 30 the anonymous team shared a whitepaper announcing 300 million players to date, a figure Decrypt noted was nearly one-third of Telegram's 950 million active users. That number is the project's own count of cumulative players, not a verified active-user metric. Pavel Durov had already cited 239 million players on July 5, and the team put the tally at 250 million just days later.^[1][2]

The whitepaper claimed a string of records: the largest Telegram channel ever with 52 million subscribers, the fastest YouTube channel to ten million subscribers at six days, and the fastest product to 100 million players at two months. It also reported around 50 million daily active players and participants in more than 190 countries. Every one of these numbers is a project self-report, and the 300 million figure in particular became the story's most disputed number.^[1]

Hamster Kombat followed Notcoin, the original Telegram tap-to-earn game, whose NOT token launched to millions of players earlier in 2024 and peaked at a market cap of nearly $3 billion. The distribution rail mattered as much as the game: a July 31 Telegram update added an in-app browser supporting decentralized TON-hosted websites in all mobile and desktop apps, which Telegram said made Web3 immediately available to its almost one billion monthly users. The tap-to-earn wave rode rails the platform had just finished building.^[2][1][6]

2. The eligibility funnel narrows to 131 million

Season 1 eligibility was a moving target. On June 6 the project said Points Per Hour, the game's passive-income metric, was the main criterion for airdrop eligibility. In July it proposed reweighting the rules in favor of collecting keys. The snapshot that fixed eligibility was taken on September 21, five days before the token launched, and players who had spent months optimizing one metric discovered that another one had decided their payout.^[5]

Over 300 million people have joined Hamster Kombat since March 26, 2024, 131 million qualified for the airdrop on September 26th and around 2.3 million were banned as cheaters.^[3][5]

— Hamster Kombat team, X post, September 22, 2024

In other words, just 43 percent of the claimed 300 million users were eligible. The 2.3 million banned accounts were disqualified for using bots or multiple accounts, and the ban wave drew public disputes from players who said honest accounts were punished while real cheaters slipped through. That complaint was plausible: Python auto-clicker tools that automated every in-game task had circulated openly on GitHub throughout the boom.^[5]

Three numbers in this saga must never be conflated: 300 million claimed cumulative players, 131 million qualified airdrop recipients, and 30 million users the project later said had begun trading on launch day. Each measures a different stage of the same funnel, and only the middle number ever determined who received tokens. Every credible account of the craze starts by keeping them apart.^[5][2][4]

3. Durov's Paris summer

The airdrop preparations unfolded while Telegram itself was in legal shock. On August 24, 2024, founder Pavel Durov was detained on arrival in Paris. A French preliminary investigation had begun in February 2024, and a formal judicial investigation was opened on July 8. Durov later confirmed that after arriving he was interviewed by police for four days.^[8][7]

On August 28, prosecutors placed Durov under formal investigation on a list of offenses: complicity in administering an online platform enabling illicit transactions in an organized group, punishable by up to ten years' imprisonment and a 500,000-euro fine; refusal to communicate legally requested intercept data; complicity in further offenses, including organized distribution of child sexual abuse images and drug trafficking; organized-crime money laundering; and undeclared cryptography services. The prosecutor's office cited Telegram's near-total absence of responses to judicial requests. Judicial supervision set a five-million-euro deposit, twice-weekly police check-ins, and a bar on leaving France.^[7]

Using laws from the pre-smartphone era to charge a CEO with crimes committed by third parties on the platform he manages is a misguided approach.^[8]

— Pavel Durov, Telegram founder, September 5, 2024

Durov's September 5 statement countered that Telegram maintains an official EU representative that accepts and replies to law-enforcement requests, that he had personally helped French authorities establish a counter-terrorism hotline with Telegram, and that claims the platform is an anarchic paradise were untrue. Before his detention, he had praised Hamster Kombat as the fastest-growing digital service in the world and a potential key driver of blockchain adoption, praise that now marks the high-water point of the tap-to-earn summer.^[8][4]

4. Launch day: 60 billion tokens and the meaning of dust

HMSTR launched on The Open Network at 12pm UTC on September 26. The total supply is fixed at 100 billion tokens, with 60 billion earmarked for Season 1 recipients: 53.25 billion claimable at launch and the remaining 6.75 billion unlocking under a ten-month vesting schedule, a split the project expressed as 88.75 percent claimable and 11.25 percent locked. Another 15 billion tokens were reserved for Season 2, and the rest of the supply for market liquidity, ecosystem partnerships, and grants.^[4][5][3][1]

On launch day the project said 30 million users had already begun trading, while warning that overwhelming demand could affect users' ability to trade. The price slid to about $0.007, down 41 percent from an initial $0.012 according to CoinGecko, while CoinMarketCap showed a 25 percent drop from $0.009 and the oracles disagreed on the starting price. More than 108,000 wallets held HMSTR, and a wallet labeled as a Binance hot wallet held nearly 18 percent of the circulating supply.^[4]

You gave me dust after 4 months^[4]

— Geoffrey Nwankpa, Hamster Kombat player, September 26, 2024

Many of the accounts criticizing the airdrop said their allocation was worth less than ten dollars, and several described their reward as dust, the industry term for trivial leftover amounts of crypto. No verified figure exists for an average or typical payout, and none should be invented: the documented record consists of a claimed 300 million players, 131 million recipients, a sharp day-one price drop, and a crowd of recipients counting cents. As a mass Web3 onboarding experiment, Hamster Kombat proved the power of distribution while exposing the gap between headline reach and claim-day value.^[4]