What Happened to Tap-to-Earn? The Telegram Cohort, Measured

In 2024, Telegram became the largest game-distribution event blockchain gaming has ever produced: tap-to-earn mini-apps that needed no download, no wallet and no crypto knowledge pulled in claimed audiences of 35, 47, 63 and 300 million players. The NFTVideoGames registry tracks four verified TON records from that wave. Eighteen months on, the measured answer is that not one of them is still the game you tapped in 2024 — every one ended the loop, rebuilt it, became a platform, or went quiet.

The wave, briefly#

The formula was friction-free: a Telegram mini-app, a hamster or a coin to tap, and a promised airdrop on The Open Network. Notcoin ran 35 million players through a coin-tapping screen in four months and closed the loop in April 2024; Hamster Kombat claimed ~300 million before its September 2024 token; Catizen became Telegram’s top-grossing game on a claimed 63.4 million players; X Empire claimed ~47 million on a cartoon-Musk empire builder. All four launched tokens on TON between May and October 2024. Every one of those tokens now trades roughly 83–98% below its launch-window peak. (Claimed player figures are self-reported — the registry records them as claims, not measurements.)

The four, measured#

• Notcoin — pivoted, the cleanest ending in the set. The mining phase simply ended in April 2024, the token launched May 16, and the app relaunched as “Explore” — a task-based attention marketplace where advertisers pay users in NOT. The game ended; the product became an ad network. The registry counts that as its thirtieth distinct ending mechanism.
• Hamster Kombat — active, but a different game. After the “dust” airdrop, the team relaunched as the HamsterVerse with its own gaming L2 (Hamster Network, February 2025) and shipped Season 2 — GameDev Heroes, running a studio instead of tapping an exchange — in June 2026. Daily cipher and combo mechanics still run. The reported player base is down ~86% from peak.
• Catizen — active, as a platform. The cat-merge game became a ~30-title Game Center where CATI buys discounted in-game items — plus a January 2026 announcement that Pluto Studio is “going all-in on AI” with agent and trading products (Cati Agent, Catrix). The game survives by becoming the store.
• X Empire — unknown, the silent one. The X token trades ~83–95% below TGE; satellite mini-apps (Dogiators, Mememe) still exist but the official signal has decayed past what our verification standard accepts. It carries the 30-day re-review window and sits in the October 22, 2026 sweep.

The mechanism: the airdrop was the product#

Tap-to-earn inverted the usual failure mode documented in how blockchain games end. Those games mostly died from economies, exploits or studio collapse. The Telegram cohort didn’t die — the reason to play ended on a schedule. The airdrop was the product, and once it distributed, the retention question answered itself: Notcoin’s designers chose honesty and turned the game off; Hamster Kombat rebuilt the loop; Catizen abstracted it into a platform; X Empire just faded. Four different answers to the same event, and the registry marks them four different ways.

What it rhymes with#

This is the play-to-earn postmortem compressed into eighteen months: the earn promise created the audience, the audience vanished with the promise, and the survivors are the ones who built something a player might want without the payout. The difference is scale — no Axie-era game ever claimed 300 million users — and honesty: the tap-to-earn cohort’s endings were mostly designed, not collapsed. For the chain itself, the survival-by-chain measurement already counts TON as the youngest chain in the set with a documented ending. If you want to try the survivor, our Hamster Kombat start-guide covers what Season 2 actually is today — and the verification standard explains why X Empire sits at unknown rather than dead.

Verified September 22, 2026 · Registry: 165 tracked games · how we verify