What the tap-to-earn wave revealed: retention after the airdrop
Hamster Kombat, Notcoin and Catizen amassed tens of millions of users in Telegram. A month after the token listing, activity dropped by orders of magnitude.
In 2024 tap-to-earn became the most widespread acquisition format in the crypto industry. The mechanic is simple: a user opens a Telegram bot, taps the screen, accumulates in-game currency and waits for a token airdrop. Notcoin gathered 35 million users; Hamster Kombat claimed 300 million. The numbers are impressive, but their relevance to performance marketing is indirect.
What happens after the listing
The token goes live on an exchange. A portion of users sell what they received in the first hours, the price drops, and those remaining lose their motivation to continue. Hamster Kombat's DAU one month after listing was below 5% of its peak. Notcoin showed slightly better retention thanks to an earlier listing and less price disappointment.
For a project that used tap-to-earn as an acquisition funnel for a core product — an exchange or a casino, for example — this means conversion from bot to target action at 0.5–2%. Out of ten million tappers, 50,000 to 200,000 reach registration on the main platform.
Why these numbers are not as bad as they seem
The cost of acquiring a user into a Telegram bot ran $0.02–0.10 through mini-apps and referral chains. Even at a one-percent conversion, the cost per registration on the main platform came to $2–10, which for a Tier-3 crypto market sits within an acceptable range.
The problem is not price but quality. A user who arrived for free tokens behaves fundamentally differently from one who came on an analyst's or streamer's recommendation. The first looks for the next airdrop; the second is ready to trade. Registration-to-first-deposit conversion for tap-to-earn traffic ran 3–6%, versus 10–18% for influencer traffic.
What still works, and the lesson for the media plan
Telegram bots as an acquisition format work, but without the illusion of free tokens. Mini-apps with quizzes, demo modes and yield calculators convert at lower rates than tap-to-earn but retain three to five times better. A user who completed a quiz on trading risks is more likely to make a deliberate deposit.
Referral mechanics also survived: a user invites friends and earns a bonus. The difference is that the bonus is tied to the invitee's action, not to the number of invitations. This cuts out bot farms and people who spray links into chats for volume.
Tap-to-earn demonstrated the ceiling of the "free in exchange for attention" mechanic. It builds an enormous top of funnel and converts almost nothing into money. For an iGaming or crypto-exchange advertiser the lesson is straightforward: if an acquisition channel promises millions of users at zero cost, the question is not "how many will come" but "how many of them will deposit a month later." The answer is usually measured in fractions of a percent.
We use Telegram bots as one source in the media plan but hold them to the same metrics as every other channel: cost per registration with completed KYC, cost per first deposit, day-30 retention. Without those numbers, millions of bot users remain just a large number.
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