How to Start Catizen: Telegram’s Top-Grossing Game

ByNFT Video Games Editorial Team

Catizen is Telegram’s top-grossing game — a cat-merging mini-app that grew into a 30-title Game Center. Starting takes one tap inside Telegram and costs nothing; the honest version is that it’s a free casual game with an optional token layer, not an income — the CATI earn window peaked with the 2024 airdrop.

What Catizen is#

A merge-style casual game that lives entirely inside Telegram: combine cats, upgrade your cat city, collect rewards. It became the platform’s biggest game by revenue on a claimed 63.4 million players and has since grown into a Game Center — a catalog of roughly thirty mini-games where CATI tokens buy discounted in-game items. Its publisher Pluto Studio took an Animoca Brands investment in May 2025 and announced an “all-in on AI” direction in January 2026, so expect the surface to keep shifting toward a platform rather than a single game.

Requirements#

  • A Telegram account — the entire game is a mini-app. Nothing to install beyond Telegram itself (iOS/Android/desktop all work).
  • Nothing to buy and no wallet to start. A TON wallet (like Tonkeeper) only matters if you later want to withdraw, trade, or spend CATI.
  • Optional: CATI token purchases and in-game spending speed up progression — the free loop works without them.

The start#

  1. Open the official Catizen bot in Telegram — get the link from catizen.ai, since impersonator bots clone it constantly — and launch the mini-app.
  2. Merge cats to level up your city; the daily tasks and events are the main free progression drivers.
  3. Browse the Game Center tab when you want variety — it hosts the other mini-games in the ecosystem.
  4. Optional: connect a TON wallet only if you want to touch the CATI side — earn, spend or withdraw. The core game never requires it.

What the NFT layer adds#

  • No NFTs in the core game — cats and items are off-chain; the blockchain piece is the CATI jetton on TON plus tradable items in some Game Center titles.
  • CATI jetton — launched September 2024; trades on TON DEXs and major exchanges, well below its launch-window peak. Inside the ecosystem it buys discounted items and staking/launchpool access.
  • Wallet at the edge — like the rest of the Telegram cohort, the chain only appears when you choose to move value off-platform.

Safety notes#

Two honest warnings. First, expectations: CATI already airdropped and trades far below its 2024 peak — treat in-game earnings as pocket change and be skeptical of any “next Catizen airdrop” pitch. Second, impersonation: Catizen is heavily cloned — fake bots, fake claim pages and fake CATI tokens circulate constantly. Enter only through the link on the official site, never connect a wallet to a “claim” page sent in DMs or comments, and the real game never asks for a seed phrase.

Verified September 22, 2026 · how we verify

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