The Great Hamster Kombat Tap-Out: How a Viral Telegram Game Duped Thousands of Ethiopians

A wave of social media 'influencers' contributed to this trend, positioning themselves as self-appointed experts in a nascent, obscure space.

The sight of city dwellers tapping away at their smartphones is hardly noteworthy in a metropolis like Addis Ababa. However, over the past few months, an unusually high level of attention has been directed towards these screens. Whether in taxis, service lines, or family gatherings, it's become common to spot several individuals engaged in relentless tapping on images displayed on their devices.

At first glance, one might assume they're rapidly liking social media posts or playing an addictive game. But a closer examination reveals something quite peculiar: these people are busy at 'work.'

Hamster Kombat, a viral Telegram sensation, promised lucrative payouts at some future date, leading many to enthusiastically recruit family and friends via links while playing the role of a 'CEO' on the Mini app. Users are labeled as CEOs as they perform various tasks (mostly tapping) to earn tokens on the platform. Hamster is easily the most popular among the hundreds of Play-to-Earn (P2E) games that have swept the globe over the past year.

The galloping hype came to a screeching halt a few weeks back as memes of disappointment replaced earlier pronouncements of financial wizardry.

Nahom Mekib, 30, flung his phone in a fit of rage on the late September afternoon that was set to be a joyous occasion. Over the past five months, the IT technician spent hours daily tapping on a chubby Hamster’s image as he awaited the pending payout. He was far from alone in his newfound obsession, as people from every social status, creed, and age group devoted hours to the plump pet.

After hearing from a distant friend that sizable payouts were given out on a similar click-to-earn Telegram game (Notcoin), Nahom was expecting a few hundred dollars’ worth of tokens to flow into his crypto wallet.

“I feel duped,” he told Shega after receiving HMSTR tokens worth less than 1000 birr.

Thousands of Ethiopians echoed the sentiment as long hours of ‘work’ flushed down the drain for what was touted as a historic digital currency milestone.

A wave of social media 'influencers' contributed to this trend, positioning themselves as self-appointed experts in a nascent, obscure space. Content creators like Jason Peters, founder of Ethio Tech with JP, were among the online personalities who acquired significant engagement and authority on the topic from on apps like TikTok. Several others have also cultivated their respective followings with Amharic tutorial-like YouTube videos.

Unfortunately, most of these online personalities have chosen silence in recent weeks with the players having only themselves to blame.

What fuels a global tapping craze?

In mid-2018, Nikolai and Pavel Durov, the co-founding brothers of Telegram, introduced The Open Network (TON), a unique blockchain architecture enabling cryptocurrency functionality on the social media platform.

As the easily accessible infrastructure caught some wind and issued tokens (digital keys), the US Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) filed a restraining order. It forced later development responsibilities to be passed onto the NewTon foundation and an online open-source community. The SEC argued that tokens functioned like typical securities in capital markets, requiring a full disclosure process informing investors of the exact nature of the items being purchased. A dispute that presages subsequent developments in an emerging space significantly removed from traditional legal frameworks.

TON relaunched in 2021 to become a highly valued digital asset currently being traded at a little over five dollars. Driving the value of this digital asset is a comprehensive suite of tools that allow developers to create decentralized apps on Telegram. TON fuels transactions, enable governance, and establishes a stable infrastructure where a social gaming frenzy can blossom.

In 2023, Telegram launched the Mini Apps feature, which allows developers to create lightweight applications for gaming, shopping and the like that operate within the platform. By January it allowed the Mini Apps to integrate with the TON blockchain infrastructure unlocking new capabilities for the developers. More than half of Telegram's 950 million users are estimated to be interacting with at least one mini-app every month.

Some of the mini apps on the platform became niche services in a short with a few like Hamster and Notcoin garnering worldwide appeal.

The Hamster craze reached a global fever pitch in mid-June, prompting allegations by Iran’s military that it was part of the West’s “soft war” amid the country’s elections. The anonymous developers denied the election tampering claim via email in response to media inquiries.

What does TON have to do with Hamster?

As with most successful ideas, Hamster Kombat modified the tap-to-earn model from a viral sensation just a few months back. In an all-too-similar format, millions were tapping on a giant image of a coin with a triangle on it in hopes of reaping some final reward. Unlike Hamster, its predecessor NotCoin retained public confidence (a valuable asset in the speculative currency market) as it delivered on most of its initial value proposition.

Notcoin garnered nearly