X Empire, an Elon Musk-themed tap-to-earn game that has attracted over 50 million players in the last few months, announced Friday that it will launch its X token on The Open Network on October 24 and hold its airdrop to players on the same date.
The launch had been slightly delayed, as X Empire ended its “mining phase” on September 30 ahead of the apparently imminent drop. But two days later, the developers said that they had faced unexpected delays, and would launch a brief “chill phase” season to tide players over.
The “chill phase” season essentially reboots everyone’s progress back to zero, and the X Empire team allocated an additional 5% of the token supply to reward those players who stick around to play during this mini-season of gameplay.
Overall, between the two phases, 75% of the total X token supply will be given away to players. That’s 517.5 billion tokens out of the 690 billion supply. The remaining tokens are reserved for “new users and the next phases” following the airdrop, suggesting plans to continue the game following the token launch.
X Empire originally launched as “Musk Empire,” tasking players with tapping the screen to earn in-game coins, and then using those coins to upgrade the attributes of a cartoonish Elon Musk lookalike. The game rebranded a few weeks later, and has gradually introduced avatars based on other familiar crypto icons, such as Telegram CEO Pavel Durov and Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin.
It’s arguably the hottest Telegram tap-to-earn game at the moment that hasn’t held its airdrop yet, following the Hamster Kombat drop on September 26. The TON network recently passed the milestone of 100 million unique wallets holding Toncoin (TON), up from around 4 million at the start of the year, due in large part to the crypto gaming craze.