Hamster Kombat picked up the baton from Notcoin, leading the next generation of Telegram crypto games while apparently amassing huge droves of players—more than 150 million, the game’s developers recently claimed amid a flurry of social media hype.

What’s driving players to the game, which pairs simple tapping gameplay with lightly strategic moves as you take the role of a hamster CEO of a crypto exchange? An upcoming token airdrop, of course, providing an incentive for all of that tapping and more.

We’ve been tuned into the Hamster Kombat hype over the last few weeks here at Decrypt’s GG, and we have both hard details and clear teases about what to expect from the launch—where, when, and how to put yourself in the best position to earn a bigger bag of tokens.

Here’s everything we know so far. Check back, as we plan to update this story as more details firm up ahead.

What is the Hamster Kombat token?

Hamster Kombat announced in late May that it will launch a token on The Open Network (TON), a layer-1 blockchain that was originally created by Telegram years back before development was continued externally by the community.

It’s the same chain that Notcoin launched its NOT token on, and that’s gone on to become this year’s biggest gaming token launch with a peak market cap well above $2 billion. Amid Notcoin hype and growing excitement over Hamster Kombat and other games on Telegram, Toncoin (TON) itself has surged into the top 10 overall cryptocurrencies by market cap.

When is it coming?

The Hamster Kombat website notes a July target for the token generation event (TGE), which is typically when a token airdrop opens up for eligible players. Previously, the team had said during a Twitter Spaces in early June that it was aiming for July, which the team then confirmed to Decrypt via a TON representative.

Crypto exchanges such as Gate.io, Bitget, and KuCoin have already announced plans to support pre-market trading for the Hamster Kombat token, which they’re referring to by the token name HMSTR.

How many tokens will players get?

It’s not yet known how many tokens players will be able to claim. Notcoin, which set the standard for this kind of Telegram game airdrop, gave players one on-chain NOT token for every 1,000 in-game coins they mined in the game.

Hamster Kombat appears to be taking a different approach, however. Early in June, the team tweeted that airdrop allocations will not be handled simply based on how many coins you stack up in the game before some deadline ahead.

"Airdrop will depend on the profit per hour and some other [activity] parameters that we will reveal later, NOT the coin balance," the official game account tweeted on June 6, adding that users should "play wisely." And on June 18, the team again tweeted “profit per hour over coin balance,” attempting to reinforce the notion after plenty of questions on the matter.

What does this mean? While Hamster Kombat puts a big, round number of earned coins in clear view, simply building the biggest pile doesn’t mean you’ll wind up with the best possible bag. Instead, it appears that you’ll be better off reinvesting those coins into upgrades to boost your profit-per-hour mark, which determines your level of passive earning.

Check out our Hamster Kombat tips guide, along with specific, dedicated guides on the daily combo and daily cipher code, to boost your in-game earnings ahead of the airdrop.

Edited by Ryan Ozawa.