TL;DR

• The Telegram-based game ‘Hamster Kombat’ has pulled in over 100M users since March, helping to prove a foundational growth blueprint in web3.

Full Story

Most people don’t lend vast chunks of their money out on a daily basis — and they typically don’t use it to secure decentralized blockchains.

Which is why we’ve never seen lending and staking as features that may one day lead to crypto mass adoption.

When trying to guess at which applications will get us there, we tend to place our bets on:

• Gaming

• Payments

• And/or social media

With gaming being the most obvious in our minds, because it’s the easiest category to break in to (payments and social media each have heavily established network effects that people are reluctant to leave).

Ok — now, don’t laugh — but this new Telegram-based game ‘Hamster Kombat’ helps prove that point (we said don’t laugh).

The game has already pulled in over 100M users (that’s 2x the total amount of US crypto holders) — and it only launched in March.

And yeah, it’s piggy-backing off Telegram’s 900M strong user base — and yeah, it only really started picking up users when the game makers announced they were going to run an airdrop…

But that’s a good thing!

Because it helps confirm a much used blueprint, for others to follow:

Find a crypto aligned network with a ton of users → create a product for that network → announce an airdrop to attract new users fast.

If the product is solid, a large percentage of those new users will stick around and continue to use the product.

The foundations of this approach aren’t exclusive to web3 either!

Look at Farmville:

They found a network with a ton of users (Facebook) → created a product for that network (Farmville) → marketed that product (via Facebook Ads).

Will ‘Hamster Kombat’ survive in the long run?

No idea. But the growth blueprint it uses probably will.