Viral Telegram game Hamster Kombat has banned 2.3 million cheaters and will distribute half their earnings among “honest players” while burning (or effectively destroying) the rest. This is one of the final steps ahead of the game’s hotly anticipated HMSTR token launch and airdrop on The Open Network (TON).

Hamster Kombat claims to have had over 300 million players furiously tapping their screens in an attempt to gain a portion of the airdrop. A recent tweet explains that 131 million of these players have qualified for the September 26 airdrop. But 2.3 million of those players have been called out as cheaters, who were caught by the team via analyzing user behavior.

“One person connected over 400 accounts to a single Binance address,” Hamster Kombat’s anonymous development team said, “while another invited almost 2,000 ‘friends,’ all of whom were flagged by our anti-cheat system.”

With the ban hammer, the team swiped 6.8 billion tokens from the hands of cheaters, half of which will be redistributed to legit players. The rest will be burned, or cut from the total supply—a move that can sometimes boost the price of a token by making it scarcer.

If Bybit pre-market trading were to align with the eventual market price of HMSTR, the current price of $0.08 suggests that the game prevented $544 million worth of tokens from hitting the wallets of cheaters. Pre-market trading allows traders to speculate on the eventual price of a token but it’s worth noting that it is very often wrong.

“Cheaters don’t belong in our community. They automate their selling through software to get an advantage over regular players.” Hamster Kombat explained on Twitter. “We care about our players and market participants, especially long-term holders, and want to protect them.”

This comes ahead of the HMSTR token launch and airdrop on Thursday. Out of the 100 billion token total supply, 60% of tokens will be distributed in this initial airdrop with an additional 15% being reserved for the second season of Hamster Kombat. This will be the last of the HMSTR tokens reserved for the community, according to a recent Twitter post.

Keeping the hype train moving is a challenge that all tap-to-earn games face. Notcoin, the game that kickstarted the craze, reinvented itself by partnering with other projects like Lost Dogs and Flappy Bird as it looks to become the “Netflix” of social games. Meanwhile, the swipe-to-earn game Catizen crafted its tokenomics to support 19 total seasons of airdrops.

Edited by Andrew Hayward