In summary
- Telegram game Hamster Kombat launched its HMSTR token on Thursday on The Open Network (TON), recording more than $1.2 billion in trading volume in its first 24 hours.
- Although some players complained that the airdrops were smaller than expected, the token saw considerable trading action on its first day on the market.
- HMSTR currently has a price of $0.0067 and a market capitalization of around $430 million, placing it in the top 200 coins by market capitalization.
Telegram game Hamster Kombat launched its long-awaited HMSTR token on Thursday on The Open Network (TON), and while some players complained that the airdrops were smaller than expected and felt like “dust,” the token had a considerable trading action on its first day on the market.
HMSTR recorded more than $1.2 billion in trading volume in its first 24 hours, according to data from CoinGecko early Friday, placing it not far behind the 24-hour trading volume of major cryptocurrencies such as Binance Coin (BNB), Dogecoin ( DOGE) and XRP.
The token is currently priced at $0.0067, dropping approximately 18% in the last 24 hours and sitting at a current market capitalization of around $430 million. This puts it in the top 200 coins by market capitalization, although it is notably below the $970 million market capitalization of Notcoin, the original game that started the tap-to-win gaming craze on Telegram earlier this year.
Along with the price of the token and the size of the allocations, the other big question surrounding the Hamster Kombat airdrop was whether The Open Network could handle the burden of distributing the token to potentially over 100 million players.
That question arose in late August when the network stopped producing blocks, effectively shutting down—twice in a single week due to immense demand for airdrop claims for a memecoin called DOGS. Periods of inactivity framed the announcement of the Hamster Kombat airdrop and the token launch date.
TON Core’s core developers even warned earlier this month that airdrops of games like Hamster Kombat and Catizen could cause further network disruptions.
But there was no downtime with last week’s launch of Catizen (CATI), and that was again the case on Thursday with HMSTR. In a statement provided to Decrypt by the TON Core development team, they described the Hamster Kombat airdrop as the “largest airdrop in the history of cryptocurrencies.”
“This huge surge in traffic has caused some third-party services to experience overloads, but the TON network has remained generally stable, with blocks produced continuously without interruption and fixed network fees,” they said, suggesting that “TON is likely the only Blockchain that can withstand events of this magnitude.”
“TON is making history,” they added, “and we are proud to support a network that empowers communities, tries the never seen before, and offers users highly engaging projects.”
Hamster Kombat is currently in the middle of a brief “interlude season” that is expected to last a couple of weeks before the release of the second full season of gameplay and new in-game rewards. Future plans for Hamster Kombat over the next year include expanding beyond its original origins as a mini app on Telegram, releasing more games, and offering another airdrop next summer.
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