How Telegram Game ’Hamster Kombat’ Got 300 Million Users—and the Ire of Iran’s Military

You are a hamster, you want to get rich, and you’re also the CEO of a crypto exchange. This is the premise of Hamster Kombat, the new Telegram “mini-game” that claims to have more than 300 million players. It’s become so popular that in June, an Iranian military leader accused it of distracting voters amidst the country’s elections, saying it was a tool in the West’s “soft war” against Iran’s theocracy.

The game’s creators are anonymous, so there’s no telling whether they’re involved in election tampering. Over email—they were too spooked about doxing to get on the phone—the people claiming to be Hamster Kombat’s developers swore they did not work for the US government, joking, “Should we send a confirmation letter from our CIA email?”

The founders are cagey about their backgrounds, but here’s what they told WIRED: They’ve worked in professional gaming for 15 years, they’ve been mining and trading bitcoin since it was below $100, they have no outside investors, their team is now 50 people (working remotely with no headquarters), and they had the idea for Hamster Kombat in January. Why hamsters? “We just love hamsters! And some of our team members used to have them as pets in childhood.”

The game launched on March 26, and immediately users began playing to earn free “coins” that will (they hope) soon have value. Now there are supposedly more Hamster CEOs than there are people in France, Spain, Italy, and the United Kingdom combined.

While user numbers can’t be verified, the Hamster Kombat Telegram channel has 53 million subscribers (the largest in the app), their YouTube channel has nearly 35 million (more than Beyoncé’s 27 million), their X account has 12 million. Even accounting for bot-puffery, the game is arguably the fastest-growing project in the history of crypto.

“There were two specific precursors to our idea,” explain the creators. The first was Telegram’s “mini-app” ecosystem, which they view as the next mega-platform. “Telegram is basically the only social platform that natively supports Web3 and has 950 million users,” claim the founders. And this ecosystem has a smooth UX; in one click you begin playing. The creators liked that they could “immediately convert incoming users without requiring them to download an app from the App Store or Google Play.”