Hamster Kombat: The Tapping Craze That Worried Governments

In the summer of 2024, a surprising number of people around the world spent their commute doing one thing: tapping a cartoon hamster on their phone screen. The hamster ran a fictional crypto exchange, every tap earned coins, and the coins, players hoped, would one day turn into a real token. The game was Hamster Kombat, and for a few months it was one of the most talked-about things in crypto.

Hamster Kombat launched in March 2024 as a Telegram mini app, a game that runs inside the Telegram messenger, built around the TON blockchain. Its token, HMSTR, began trading on 26 September 2024 after the game's first season. As of 12 November 2026, HMSTR did not rank among the 40 largest gaming tokens tracked by CoinGecko, while two other Telegram games, Notcoin and Catizen, sat in that list with market caps of about $32.3 million and $25.0 million.

How the game works

Hamster Kombat is a tap-to-earn clicker. Like any clicker, the loop is simple: you tap to earn in-game coins, then spend them on upgrades that make each tap, and your idle income, worth more. There is no skill test and no opponent: the "kombat" is with your own patience. What kept people coming back was not the gameplay but the hope that their coins would count when the token arrived.

Because it lives inside Telegram, there is nothing to install beyond the messenger itself, which helped it spread at enormous speed through group chats.

Governments take notice

Few games have drawn official attention from so many countries in so little time:

• Iran: in June 2024, military officials and state-linked media criticised the app.
• Russia: officials called it a potential pyramid scheme, and on 18 July 2024 Duma committee chair Anatoly Aksakov proposed banning it.
• Ukraine: a government centre warned that players' personal data could end up with Russian military forces.
• Uzbekistan: officials threatened fines or even prison for converting the game's crypto into cash.

Security researchers raised a different alarm. In July 2024, Kaspersky reported that criminals were using fake promises of Hamster Kombat cash-outs to steal Telegram accounts.

The people behind it

The game's founders were reported as Eduard Gurinovich, Nikita Anufriev and Aleksandr Pasechnik. Anufriev, the marketing director, left in August 2024 after a dispute over promised compensation. The Bell, an independent Russian outlet, also linked another businessman to the project.

Tokenomics: why the airdrop stung

The tap-to-earn model has a built-in tension. During the farming phase, a game hands out huge amounts of in-game currency that cost nothing to create. When the real token launches, all that paper wealth has to be squeezed into a fixed supply. Hamster Kombat's answer was to weigh activity, not raw coins, which left many heavy tappers feeling short-changed. Token prices are volatile, and the HMSTR market today is a small fraction of the attention the game once had.

WGC's take

Hamster Kombat proved that Telegram could put a game in front of a staggering audience overnight. It also showed the limits of a game that is really an airdrop with a hamster on top: once the token arrived, the reason to tap faded. For game designers, the lesson is the same one Pixels learned: rewards can attract players, but only a game keeps them.