Breaking the ecological "island", will Catizen open the Telegram mini-game 2.0 era?

An interesting game can indeed quickly attract players and achieve success in the short term, but fun alone is usually not enough to properly evaluate a project. The chain game projects that truly achieve reasonable development and long-term success are without exception based on a solid technical foundation.

Despite the fact that on-chain games and engines are still in the early stages, the game zone in the Telegram x TON ecosystem has recently attracted attention from both inside and outside the industry, relying on its massive user base and traffic. Especially, The Open League (TOL) launched by the TON Foundation has provided an opportunity for many outstanding projects to showcase their skills. Catizen, the winner of three consecutive championships, has particularly impressed with its strong technical capabilities.

The hottest cat chain game in the Ton ecosystem, launching the Play2Airdrop mode

Catizen is a Web3.0 social entertainment platform on Telegram, aiming to create a decentralized consumer application that integrates mini-games, short dramas, and e-commerce. Its current core is a cat game called Catizen (Cat Citizen) built on the TON ecosystem. This game combines the metaverse, GameFi, and AI. It has launched a revolutionary Play2Airdrop mode, allowing players to earn future airdrops while playing.

Since the beta version was launched on March 19, 2024, the number of Catizen players has exceeded 22.5 million, with nearly 1.3 million on-chain users and a peak of over 3.5 million daily active players. The number of paying users has reached 500,000. The latest data shows that the total number of on-chain Catizen users has exceeded 1.25 million, and has ranked first in the TON Open League for three consecutive seasons.

It is no exaggeration to say that Catizen is definitely the top chain game project in the Telegram x TON ecosystem. Sasha, the founder of the pioneering project Notcoin, bluntly stated in a previous interview that he only sees sustainability in Catizen in the current era where a large number of Telegram Clicker imitations are rampant.

Build a solid technical foundation with exclusive game engine and SDK

The success of Catizen in a short period of time may seem unexpected, but it is actually reasonable. Unlike other chain game competitors that invest heavily in advertising and promotion, Catizen’s native growth relies on its solid technical infrastructure -.

1. The exclusive game engine for Catizen, a Trinity-based platform

Compared to competing Gaming Bots that rely on third-party game engines, Catizen has built its own game engine called Catizen Game Engine. This game engine is specifically designed for Telegram mini-programs and currently supports three unique features: high-performance millisecond-level multi-threaded loading, data tracking, and global distributed loading technology.

• Catizen’s high-performance millisecond-level multithreading utilizes multithreaded asynchronous loading to improve game performance, parallel computing on multi-core processors, reduce main thread blocking, accelerate game startup speed, ensure smooth scene transitions, and bring players a seamless experience.
• The Catizen data tracking platform has built-in real-time data analysis, with multi-dimensional data mining and machine learning capabilities, optimizing game content, improving user retention, and increasing payment conversion rates. It supports custom reports and real-time monitoring, driving decision-making with data.
• Catizen’s global distributed loading technology is integrated with the global Content Delivery Network (CDN), utilizing intelligent edge computing and regional caching to ensure fast resource allocation and low latency downloads. Players can enjoy high-quality gaming experience no matter where they are.

From a technical perspective, Catizen’s game engine design focuses on lightweight, which also enables the game to run smoothly on devices with different performance, especially performing well on mobile devices. Its exclusive game engine supports multiple operating systems and devices, including Android and iOS, allowing players to seamlessly switch game processes through Telegram on different devices. By optimizing the integration with Telegram, Catizen uses its API and Bot functionality to achieve closer interaction and player social experience.

2**, SDK lay a solid foundation for building a Catizen ecosystem**

Catizen’s software development kit provides a one-stop service, aiming to enable H5 game developers to achieve one-click publishing on Telegram by accessing the SDK. The whole process can be completed in just three steps: create an H5 mini game, connect to the Catizen SDK and game engine, and publish it in the Catizen Game Center with just one click.

In fact, the development team behind Catizen, Pluto Studio, had already entered the Web2 mini-game track as early as 2018 and had a lot of successful experience in developing and publishing mini-games. After entering the Telegram Web3 game track, they became more adept. It is reported that the Catizen team has signed contracts with 18 popular WeChat mini-games and will gradually launch them on the Catizen game platform using the team’s valuable chain reform experience and rich experience in deploying the TON ecosystem. Compared with traditional chain game SDKs, the Catizen SDK provides an easy way to create and manage Telegram Bots, making it easy for games to achieve functions such as message processing, user interaction, and game notifications, such as inline buttons, quick replies, and chatbots, enhancing game interactivity and user experience.

Similarly, the Catizen SDK supports multiple operating systems (such as Android, iOS) and devices, allowing developers to create cross-platform gaming experiences. Its concise and powerful API enables developers to efficiently implement various gaming functions, coupled with the professional technical support from the Catizen team, quickly assisting developers in solving problems and improving development efficiency. With these advantages, Catizen’s SDK enables developers to efficiently create high-quality, cross-platform games, while fully leveraging the features of the Telegram platform to provide rich user interaction and commercial opportunities.

3**, the strong technological barrier makes Catizen stand out in the market competition**

At present, there are quite a few Gaming Bots deployed on Telegram, and there are about 300 projects on the TON chain. Most of them have built mini-programs on Telegram and accessed them through the application center. However, the vast majority of Telegram ecological mini-games still maintain ‘traditional’ technical features, such as development using the Telegram Bot API, supporting H5 interactive experience, etc. This is the technical solution adopted by the majority of Telegram mini-program projects at present, but it will lead to poor ecological scalability, ultimately turning itself into an island in the Telegram gaming ecosystem.

To be frank, most Telegram mini-programs on the current market rely too much on the Telegram platform, which makes it easy to be restricted by APIs. It is difficult for users to obtain and retain them, and technical support and development resources are also very limited. The interoperability with other platforms is also becoming increasingly unsatisfactory over time. In contrast, Catizen, although relying on the Telegram ecosystem, does not depend on it. They use their exclusive game engine and SDK to create technological barriers and build a relatively complete and sustainable ecosystem game. It can be said that Catizen stands out in the fierce market competition, which is closely related to its powerful technological barriers.

Taking Catizen’s multi-threaded asynchronous loading as an example, this technology stands out in the Telegram gaming ecosystem and effectively solves the problem of poor game experience caused by a large number of players online at the same time. Catizen uses this technology to handle multiple tasks without blocking the main thread, which means that when users perform a certain operation, the game can load other content in the background, thereby improving the overall response speed. At the same time, different parts of the game can be loaded simultaneously, reducing the time for users to wait for a certain function or resource to be loaded. This is particularly important for games that require dynamic loading of a large number of resources, ensuring that the game interface remains smooth and responsive during the loading process. Users will not feel that the game is stuttering or not smooth due to waiting for resource loading.

Catizen Content Delivery Network (CDN) brings players a smoother and more stable gaming environment by caching game content to the nearest servers around the world, significantly reducing latency and improving content loading speed, allowing players to quickly access game resources no matter where they are. Moreover, compared to other Telegram ecosystem games that often experience freezing and downtime, Catizen effectively offloads the load from the original server using CDN, distributing a large number of requests to multiple cache nodes. This prevents server overload, reduces pressure on the original server, and ensures that Catizen games remain stable even under high concurrent access, enabling efficient distribution of game images, audio, and video resources.

Moreover, by deeply integrating various functions of Telegram, Catizen can provide a seamless and unique user experience. This close integration allows games to fully utilize the social features of the Telegram platform, enhance user interaction and stickiness, and thus more effectively acquire and retain users. Games can stay in touch with players through message push, group interaction, etc., increasing user revisit rate.

It is worth mentioning that Catizen’s SDK enables developers to quickly develop and iterate game features, making adjustments and optimizations quickly to improve user experience and game lifecycle. Efficient resource management and network communication protocol ensure smooth performance of the game in different network environments, reducing loading time and enhancing user experience.

In fact, it doesn’t seem too difficult to simply deploy a small game on Telegram, but projects like Catizen that respond to various user/market demands in a short period of time are few and far between, especially in the competitive field of blockchain games. In plain language, it means that many people want to do it but can’t.

Compared to building a Telegram ecosystem game from scratch, Catizen’s SDK and game engine significantly reduce development complexity, saving a lot of time in game iteration. On the other hand, new smart contract languages may have a learning curve, but these languages are often optimized for specific blockchains. For similar products in the market, it usually takes a long time to use new languages (Tact, FUNC) to develop on-chain interactions, debug various functions, and ultimately optimize user experience mechanisms on the TON chain. By the time it reaches end players, Catizen has already completed function improvements and multiple iterations.

In summary, the response speed can determine the user’s flow, and the development barriers of game engines lie in experience and first-mover advantage. Today’s Catizen has already integrated these technical strengths.

The development roadmap will expand the ecological map

Catizen has released a complete 12-month development roadmap, totaling six stages, namely:

Phase 1: Launch Catizen game and incentivize users to create encryption wallets through airdrops;

Phase 2: Launching Catizen Launchpool, users can stake and mine governance token wCATI Score;

Stage 3: Release Game Center and release more games for users, support stake CATI;

Stage 4: Launch short video platform to expand female user base;

Stage 5: Attract projects from the TON ecosystem using the Open Task Platform.

Phase 6: Launching an e-commerce platform to expand the application scenarios of CATI tokens.

From the roadmap, Catizen has a very clear future plan, rather than just being a simple Gaming Bot. A clear development roadmap not only enhances project transparency, but also provides a clear direction for the long-term development of the project, and makes the encryption community more confident in it.

With strong technical strength, Catizen becomes not just a game, but a community, a movement. Here, every click and interaction contribute to the greater community benefits and ecological development.