‘Hamster Kombat’ Airdrop Delayed as Pre-Market Trading for Telegram Game Expands

Viral Telegram-based tap-to-earn game Hamster Kombat planned to launch its token on The Open Network (TON) in July, but with two days left before the end of the month, the team says it is still working out a plan to deploy the large-scale airdrop.

The Hamster Kombat website still notes a July target for the token generation event (TGE), but on Monday, the developers shared a lengthy tweet that suggests that we’re unlikely to see a token debut in the next two days before the month ends.

“We are actively working to make it happen,” they wrote of the airdrop. “Keep in mind that this is a very complex technical task for all the platforms involved since Hamster Kombat is one of the biggest projects in the industry and can become the biggest airdrop in history.”

“This presents potential overload for the networks involved in the process,” they added. “We want the airdrop to be carried out as smoothly as possible for every single one of you, and so that everyone can receive their tokens. Right now, we’re closely working with the TON blockchain team to develop the most efficient technical solution for our airdrop.”

Hamster Kombat’s anonymous development team stopped short of confirming that the token launch had been delayed. Reached for comment, however, a game representative told Decrypt’s GG, “The team is actively working on making the airdrop happen, and they will share the exact date as soon as they can.”

Adding fuel to the fire is the fact that the same representative alerted Decrypt to the news that OKX is launching pre-market futures trading for the future HMSTR token—with the feature set to launch on August 1.

Hamster Kombat is a game built within the messaging platform Telegram that rewards players with in-game coins for tapping on a cartoonish hamster, as well as for investing their coins in upgrades for a fictional crypto exchange. The game has amassed more than 250 million players in the last couple of months, apparently, while drawing criticism from government officials along the way.

Like Telegram game Notcoin before it, Hamster Kombat has said that it will launch a token on TON and offer tokens to players via an airdrop claim. Notcoin’s NOT token, released in May, quickly became 2024’s most valuable gaming token launch by market cap.

OKX joins a growing pile of exchanges that are enabling pre-market trading for the token, including Bybit, KuCoin, Bitget, and Gate.io. Pre-market trading allows crypto users to bet on the eventual price of the token ahead of the TGE.

However, Hamster Kombat’s team has yet to announce the conversion rate from in-game coins to on-chain tokens—so this type of pre-market trading could be especially risky.