In a world full of tap-to-earn games such as Hamster Kombat and Notcoin, a Telegram game with a slightly different mechanic—no matter how simple—is somewhat refreshing.

Instead of making you tap endlessly on the screen, Catizen has you swipe to combine cats together to increase their level and value—which, while effectively as simple as tapping, does require a bit more of your attention.

Claiming over 22 million users, Catizen has found a major audience thanks to its cutesy vibe, slightly more involved gameplay and the promise of future airdrops that could see players turn cute cats into a potential bag of crypto tokens.

With an airdrop apparently on the horizon, here’s an overview of Catizen and how to start breeding your own cats in your weird cartoon café—which could end up helping some cats in the real world, as well.

What is Catizen?

Catizen is a Telegram-native mini app, meaning all you need to do is launch the bot from a chat on the messaging platform and you can start playing. While similar in concept to games such as Hamster Kombat, Catizen’s unique selling point is that instead of just tapping on the screen, you’ll swipe to combine cats in your cat café in order to level them up.

With some other Telegram games struggling to keep the player’s attention past a few minutes, Catizen has added a mechanic that you actually need to pay attention to, instead of just mindlessly tapping the screen while you do something else.

That makes it feel more like a legitimate game than many of the other popular options. However, it follows the same idea that you are building up in-game currency in the hopes that it will be enough to earn you a sizable payout when an airdrop of on-chain crypto tokens arrives.

How to play Catizen

In Catizen, you control what is effectively a cat café, where visitors come in and spend time with your cats, earning you money. You’ll start out with a level one cat, who, when picked up by visitors to your café, will give you some vKITTY in-game currency.

As time goes on, more cats will be parachuted into your café, and if you have two of the same level cat, then you can drag them together to level them up into a single cat and increase their earning potential.

If wanted, you can buy cats with vKITTY to speed up the process, but regular drops and occasional in-game bonus drops of cats usually keep your café well stocked with felines.

There’s also a tangentially related fishing mini-game that feels somewhat out of place. When you get enough Fish Coins, an entirely separate currency earned through completing tasks such as daily logins or referrals, you can spend them to go fishing, where you stop a moving bar by tapping on the screen to catch a fish.

Fish can give you bonus vKITTY or even more fish coins to keep fishing with, and if by some miracle you catch one of the 50 biggest fish in the world at the end of the season, then you’ll get a bonus vKITTY payout. But really, this has almost no relation to the rest of the Catizen game experience.

When is the airdrop?

In order to actually earn anything through Catizen, you’ll need to wait for the next airdrop, which is planned for July 2024 according to a June 29 tweet from the developers. The expectation is that players' share of the airdrop tokens will be based on both vKITTY production—so how much your cats are making when they are picked up—and your highest-level cat.

That means for now, the best way to earn in Catizen is to level up your cats as fast as possible. Sitting on a giant pile of vKITTY is likely not going to be the way to maximize your earnings, so you may as well spend it on getting some top tier cats in your café.

Catizen is building on The Open Network (TON), which means that the token is expected to launch on the same blockchain as Notcoin, Hamster Kombat, Yescoin, Tapswap, and surely many other Telegram-based games to come. The game is adorned with TON iconography and also lets you connect a TON wallet.

That said, Catizen has also announced a partnership with Ethereum scaling network Mantle in April 2024, and the game’s official Twitter account includes links to both TON and Mantle-integrated versions of the mini app—so it appears that this Telegram game has multi-chain ambitions.

The game’s developers have announced plans to expand the amount of the token supply given out in the airdrop, stating that 42% of tokens will be handed out through the offering—up from a previously planned 35%.

It’s also worth mentioning that the team has promised to give 1% of revenue to charities dedicated to rescuing stray cats around the world. So by playing, you’ll likely be helping real-life cats in a small way.