tl;dr
Telegram's tap-to-earn games on The Open Network (TON) have attracted millions of new users, leading to technical pressures and outages. The surge in gaming activity has caused disruptions, with daily active user addresses reaching 1.1 million and single-day transactions peaking at 14.4 million. Pop...
Telegram's tap-to-earn games on The Open Network (TON) have attracted millions of new users, leading to technical pressures and outages. The surge in gaming activity has caused disruptions, with daily active user addresses reaching 1.1 million and single-day transactions peaking at 14.4 million.
Popular games like Hamster Kombat and Catizen are set to offer claimable tokens to millions of players, potentially intensifying network issues. TON developers are working to address these challenges and ensure network stability as they move towards mass adoption.
TON experiences unprecedented user engagement, nears upcoming airdrops for popular games Hamster Kombat and Catizen, posing technical challenges. TON grapples with outages due to increased activity, including DOGS token distributions, as developers brace for further disruptions ahead of game-related airdrops.
Telegram’s tap-to-earn games have taken the crypto world by storm, bringing hundreds of millions of prospective new users to The Open Network (TON). But a flood of Hamster Kombat and Catizen players attempting to claim their reward tokens later this month may not be all good news for the network, TON developers warned this week.
TON will “undoubtedly face more technical pressures and possibly some unforeseen issues,” the TON Core team wrote Tuesday in an official Telegram channel. Daily active user addresses have hit 1.1 million several times on TON within the past two weeks, with single-day transactions peaking at 14.4 million ahead of upcoming airdrops for popular tap-to-earn games such as Hamster Kombat and Catizen, according to developers.
Catizen, which has attracted approximately 35 million players to its Telegram app and will offer claimable tokens to at least 15 million of them based on the latest estimate, will launch its CATI token on September 20. Hamster Kombat, meanwhile, has attracted a vastly larger number of players: Over 300 million as of late July, the developers claimed, with Telegram in-app data showing nearly 86 million active users in the last month alone.
"These levels of user engagement were unimaginable in Web3 before,” TON Core developers wrote in the Telegram channel post. TON’s surge in user activity fueled by the Telegram gaming craze recently created outages on the layer-1 network. Last month, block processing on the network stopped for several hours two times in a single week. The crux of the issue, according to TON developers, was a surge in user demand tied to distributions of DOGS, a meme coin project inspired by a dog drawing from Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov. The DOGS token is held by 4.5M unique wallets on TON, they said.
Service disruptions on TON could intensify again ahead of those and other upcoming game-related airdrops on the platform. Both events will likely lead to a spike in activity on TON as recipients try to claim their rewards. But in the lead up to those airdrops, TON developers have promised to stay on top of any network issues, and attempt to overcome any roadblocks.
“We are unwavering in our commitment to building and addressing these challenges as we move toward mass adoption,” they wrote in the Telegram post.