For months, tired gamers tapped furiously on a screen — all with the goal of building a hamster-run crypto exchange and earning some tokens along the way.
Well… at least some of them did.
Among them were a few players who fancied cutting corners — letting automated bots complete missions and rake in coins on their behalf.
But now the long-awaited airdrop for Hamster Kombat has finally arrived, those with idle thumbs have finally got their comeuppance.
After gleefully waiting to see how many points they would receive, dodgy degens were shocked when they opened up their Telegram mini-app to see their balance was nil.
Instead, all they had to show for their deception was a sticker that said: “Cheating is bad.”
Estimates have previously suggested that Hamster Kombat has amassed 300 million users — and according to the tap-to-earn sensation, 2.3 million of them were cheaters.
“Enough to fill the entire city of Rome!” the project gleefully added on X.
Hamster Kombat revealed some pretty brazen examples of people trying to game the system — from one user who connected 400 accounts to one Binance address, to another who invited 2,000 so-called “friends” to see what the fuss was about.
Another red flag, we hear you ask? Tapping the same pixel each and every time. Given the size of a tap-to-earn player’s well-toned fingers, that’s exceptionally hard to do.
Over on Reddit, there was no shortage of anguish from those who had realized they were going to miss out on one of the most hotly anticipated airdrops of the year.
Some were brazen enough to claim Hamster Kombat was the scam, and not their own actions. Others naively asked if bans would be lifted. A few insisted they’d done nothing wrong.
But according to one user, clicking bots may not be the only reason for being labeled a cheater — with ad blockers, multiple accounts, and certain VPNs all potential red flags.
Now listen: I’ve been skeptical about Hamster Kombat from the get-go. I launched the app in Telegram and found the game to be a mind-numbing and tedious experience. You literally couldn’t pay me to spend a second more there than I had to — however much they tried.
Yet after seeing how the project has handled this furore, I can’t help being impressed. Out of those 6.8 billion tokens those cheaters should have received, 50% have been burned forever — reducing the supply of $HMSTR in the process. The other half has been distributed to honest gamers who played by the rules all along.
Hopefully, this will encourage people to think twice before attempting to game the system — and set a powerful example that other Web3 games should follow in the future.
From in-game assets to airdrops, bots are a stain in this burgeoning industry. They’re hugely unfair on players who invest a lot of time and effort into building up their stack. And they’re nothing short of calamitous for startups who have risked everything to launch — only to see massive marketing budgets gobbled up by greedy fraudsters who don’t even care about what their project is trying to achieve.
Understandably, Hamster Kombat hasn’t revealed exactly how it singled out cheaters, but the crypto world offers a number of novel solutions. Soulbound NFTs, which utilize something known as Proof of Personhood, are a great way of verifying whether a unique human is trying to make a claim. And that’s just one example.
Beyond those who are red-faced and sitting on the sidelines as everyone else claims their $HMSTR, some argue this Web3 game is a scam because the tokens they’ve earned have little cash value.
“After grinding for what felt for ever, i got the full 13,80€ to show up for it. Never should have wasted my time on this s***,” one Reddit poster huffed.
Others sarcastically thanked the project for wasting six months of their life — and the puns are out in full force too, with one rebranding the game as “Scamster Kombat.”
Very clever. But there’s a question worth asking: is there an unrealistic expectation of how much crypto gamers should receive, and what its cash value should be, after an airdrop like this?
Those who’ve been in the space for a while will remember how crazy things were when Axie Infinity was at its peak. The rewards were so generous that some in Southeast Asia were able to give up their jobs and cover their rent through the game alone. But somewhat inevitably, the tokenomics proved unsustainable — and the rewards on offer were hugely watered down.
Yes, there has been a whiff of controversy at times when it comes to Hamster Kombat. As Cryptonews reported, there are allegations some influencers got a bigger slice of the airdrop than everyday gamers, and outrage that 11.25% of tokens being released will remain locked up for the next 10 months. Others have complained that the requirements for earning $HMSTR were abruptly changed toward the end of the campaign.
Those are valid concerns that should be looked into. But when it comes to waging war against cheaters, Hamster Kombat is absolutely bang to rights. And if this game manages to prove sustainable in the months and years to come, rather than crashing and burning suddenly amid artificially inflated token values, history may look a little more favorably on this airdrop.
By that point though, the crypto world will be obsessing over the next craze that comes along.
Disclaimer: The opinions in this article are the writer’s own and do not necessarily represent the views of Cryptonews.com. This article is meant to provide a broad perspective on its topic and should not be taken as professional advice.
The post Opinion: Why I’m Impressed by the Hamster Kombat Airdrop appeared first on Cryptonews.
