What Hamster Kombat Did: How Telegram Built a Web3 Gaming Juggernaut
Two months ago the president of Iran, Ebrahim Raisi, was killed in a helicopter crash. Iran held an election to replace him, but there was a hitch: According to a senior official in Iran’s military, the nation’s citizens were too distracted to properly vet the candidates. Millions of Iranians, supposedly, were too busy clicking on their phones.
The game seems to have come out of nowhere. In March, it launched on TON, aka The Open Network, a Web3 ecosystem built on Telegram. Now the game is so popular that Rear Admiral Habibollah Sayyari, Iran’s deputy chief of the military, accused it of being part of the West’s “soft war” on Iran’s government. As the AP reported, Sayyari said that “One of the features of the soft war by the enemy is the ‘Hamster’ game.”
So is the United States really weaponizing Web3 hamsters against Iran? It’s a fascinating (if wild) question, but in some ways the answer is irrelevant. The question’s very existence is what matters. “This has become so fucking big, even politicians started talking about it,” says Inal Kardan, Gaming Lead at the TON Foundation.
