In a world full of tap-to-earn games such as Hamster Kombat and Notcoin, hearing that a Telegram game has a slightly different mechanic—no matter how simple—is kind of 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 34 million users, Catizen has found a major audience thanks to its cutesy vibe, slightly more involved gameplay, and the promise of a token launch and airdrop 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 another 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 other similar games, 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?

Following a delay from July, the Catizen (CATI) token launch is currently planned for September 20 on The Open Network (TON). That's the same network used by Notcoin and Hamster Kombat, as well as other Telegram games like Rocky Rabbit and X Empire. Catizen has already rolled out pre-market trading on OKX, Bybit, and Bitget ahead of the token launch.

While the token rollout has been confirmed for September 20, Catizen developer Pluto Studio has yet to confirm whether the game will airdrop tokens to players on the same date. Airdrops typically are tied to token generation events, so it's likely that players will be rewarded at the same time. However, Catizen has also teased something for September 21, so perhaps Pluto is staggering the launch in some manner.

The expectation is that your share of the airdrop tokens will be based on both your 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.

While Catizen is most closely aligned with TON, the studio also announced a partnership with Ethereum scaling network Mantle in April, 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 repeatedly announced plans to expand the amount of the token supply given out in the airdrop, most recently stating that 43% of tokens will be handed out through the offering—up from a planned 35% previously.

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.

Edited by Andrew Hayward

Editor's note: This story was originally published on June 25, 2024 and last updated with new details on September 9.