Feline Telegram game Catizen has announced that its token can be used to gain a ticket to future airdrops through a season pass. This comes amid the launch and airdrop of its CATI token on The Open Network (TON).

Catizen’s initial airdrop plans to reward players of its swipe-to-earn game with 15% of its total token supply. The token launch and airdrop is taking place today. 

Players weren’t entirely pleased when this was announced last week as they believed, as per the game’s whitepaper, 34% would be allocated to the airdrop. However, this was because Catizen was holding back 19% for a “quarterly season airdrop campaign,” which it’s not been revealed is coming in the form of an airdrop pass.

“The remaining 19% will primarily be distributed through the Airdrop Pass,” the Twitter announcement said. “The Airdrop Pass will have a 90-day cycle, distributing 1% of tokens per season. Players can earn points by completing tasks, and the airdrop pass will display players' points along with those of all Catizen players.”

This would mean that Catizen has enough remaining tokens to support 19 seasons, which will span 4 years and 8 months. While players were disappointed with their current airdrop allocation, drawn from a significantly larger portion of the total supply, these future airdrops will be buffed up with rewards from partner projects.

Tap-to-earn Telegram games suffer an existential threat of providing short-term airdrop incentives while attempting to remain sustainable across the long-term. Previous projects like Notcoin had to completely reinvented itself to keep players interested. Now as it faces the same problem, Catizen is looking to create an economic model that will support airdrops over the coming years.

It appears that the airdrop pass will be purchasable with the CATI token, as the announcement calls it a use case for the new coin, but how much it’ll cost is currently unclear.

Catizen received major backlash from its community as it was revealed to players the total amount of CATI tokens they’d earned for the airdrop. Gamers had been grinding for months in the hopes of getting a sizable chunk of tokens but many were disappointed.

It wasn’t just the size of the airdrop that annoyed players, some were also peeved by poorly communicated changes to the airdrop criteria and transparency about how the token supply was being divided. As the airdrop neared, Catizen changed the weighting of its airdrop criteria after discovering some players had been artificially boosting their earnings. While this reduced the efficiency of cheating, it also weakened those legitimately grinding the game.

In the recent announcement, Catizen claims to have heard the community and committed to change its future behavior accordingly.

“We've listened and will implement a fully transparent distribution model for CATI in the Airdrop Pass season one,” Catizen posted on Twitter.

Edited by Stacy Elliott.