TON Gaming Secures its Third Consecutive Binance Listing

TON has firmly established itself as one of the strongest narratives in Web3 gaming this cycle. After demonstrating robust user growth in Q1 and Q2, capped by the explosive Notcoin TGE that exceeded expectations and hit over $1B in market cap, a narrative has formed around the TON/Telegram mini-app ecosystem as the number one top-of-funnel distribution channel in Web3.

Amongst the influx of new mini-app developers flocking to TON for its relatively cheap and easy user acquisition, Catizen and Hamster Kombat have emerged as standout frontrunners, each capturing significant mindshare within the Web3 gaming community. Notably, both will launch their token on Binance, however, each project has achieved this by leveraging slightly different go-to-market (GTM) strategies.

Hamster Kombat has focused heavily on distribution reach and vanity metrics, using innovative methods to incentivize community growth and engagement, while Catizen has taken a different approach, optimizing for conversions and monetization depth despite its hyper-casual underpinnings.

With Catizen’s $CATI launching at above $1B FDV (now $770M FDV – $236M MC) and Hamster Kombat gearing up for their TGE on the 26th of September, this presents an ideal case study to observe the current market appetite for tier one exchange gaming listings, as well as how the market views metrics like user acquisition vs. monetization when valuing gaming tokens.

Catizen vs Hamster Kombat

What makes these two consecutive listings particularly intriguing are their many similarities, coupled with a few key differences. Let’s dive into both ecosystems and explore where they align and where they diverge, offering insights into their unique strengths and potential paths forward.

Catizen

Set in the Meowverse, players receive a digital cat upon registration, which they can upgrade to climb the leaderboard. By breeding their cats, completing quests, and participating in mini-games, players earn tokens and NFTs to advance in the game. This straightforward core gameplay loop is enhanced by a deep progression system, allowing players to seamlessly engage and progress with minimal friction while offering a nearly infinite time sink for dedicated players.

Source: Catizen in-game footage

The team’s extensive experience with WeChat mini-games has been instrumental in shaping their succes

thanks for putting this report together.

"The success of their approach is undeniable: Over 300M wallets, 82M monthly active users, and 32M DAU."

not sure if the chosen terminology makes sense to me - assuming what's meant here is 300m wallets, 82m monthly active wallets and 32m daily active wallets? finding it difficult to believe that hamster kombat serves 32m daily active unique users. it would easily be the most used crypto app on the planet.

in addition, a broader point on measuring active users in a more sybil-resistant manner. not sure if it's done currently, but could the telegram ecosystem measure active users by phone numbers tied to users' tg wallets? if active ton wallets together with a phone number could be counted, then this would definitely remove some of the noise.

I agree with you broadly speaking. Hamster Kombat is definitely massively botted, but it's impossible to know to what degree from the outside. For now we're left with public data as Telegram/TON doesn't track a lot and won't disclose more granular information. However, as to their success, there has been talks of them making a lot of money (high 8 digits) by selling their users like an ad network, but nothing substantiated. Binance actively chose not to disclose any revenue metrics in their report in contrast to what they released on Catizen. Which again leaves us a bit in the dark.

Hamster Kombat has about 55M unique TON wallets connected to the game, but that can in turn easily be botted as well, especially when incentives are at play. People can buy an anonymous phone number rather easily and TON doesn't granularly track personal info which makes their users pretty low value when compared to something like WeChat, so while it would help a bit by increasing the effort on the user-side, even associating accounts to something like a sim doesn't do the trick. I dove into that in our larger TON report, it is very important to differentiate between user quality when looking at an ecosystem like TON.

I don't see an ecosystem like Hamster Kombat as a sustainable one if they aren't able to pivot into a larger distribution platform that elevates itself from the simple clicker loop. And that's incredibly difficult to do. Their success in terms of agglomerating a massive amount of users through crypto incentives that can then be monetized like an ad network is undeniable I think, but I heavily agree that the numbers are inflated and that the quality of users is low.