What is Hamster Kombat?

Hamster Kombat is a Telegram game in which you tap the screen and buy upgrades to grow a cartoon hamster's crypto exchange. It became one of the largest tap to earn games of 2024, and in-game progress was later converted into a real token called HMSTR. The game and the token are separate things: the game is the app, while HMSTR is a token on TON.

How does the Hamster Kombat game work?

The game runs as a mini app inside Telegram, so there is nothing separate to install. In the first season you played the CEO of a fictional crypto exchange. Tapping earned coins, and spending coins on upgrades raised your "profit per hour," a passive income figure, Decrypt explained. Daily puzzles and tasks added extra rewards.

The team said in July 2024 that the game had passed 300 million players since its spring launch. Season 2, announced for late October 2024, switched the theme to running a game development studio, Blockworks reported.

What is the HMSTR token?

HMSTR is the Hamster Kombat coin. It launched on The Open Network on September 26, 2024, the same day as the airdrop to players. Total supply is 100 billion HMSTR. Sixty percent went to the first season airdrop and 15 percent was set aside for Season 2, according to Decrypt and Cointelegraph.

Cointelegraph reported that eligible players received 88.75 percent of their allocation right away, with the rest unlocking 10 months after listing. Decrypt reported that connecting a TON wallet was the only mandatory step to receive tokens. Our guide to crypto airdrops covers how these drops work in general.

Why were players removed from the Hamster Kombat airdrop?

Before launch the team said 2.3 million accounts were excluded as cheaters. Decrypt reported that one person had linked more than 400 accounts to a single exchange address. About 6.8 billion tokens taken from banned accounts were split between honest players and a burn. The team said cheaters had used software to automate selling.

What are tap to earn Telegram games?

Tap to earn games reward simple, repeated taps with in-game points that may later turn into tokens. Telegram suits them because of its huge user base and built-in TON wallet links, as our guide to why Telegram is popular in crypto explains. In February 2025, Hamster Kombat announced Hamster Network, a gaming layer 2 built on TON.

In-game points in these games have no guaranteed value, and a token's existence says nothing about how it will trade.