X Empire X

X Empire began in summer 2024 as Musk Empire, a tap-to-earn game in Telegram. Players tap to earn in-game coins and spend them upgrading a cartoon lookalike of Elon Musk. According to KuCoin, the game was renamed X Empire on 2 August 2024, and by July 2024 it had passed 16 million players. Decrypt describes the game as an unofficial tribute to Musk. After the rebrand it kept its focus on developing the attributes and businesses of the cartoon character. OKX's explainer states that X Empire is not linked to Elon Musk or to the X social network.

Beyond tapping, the game has several other mechanics. KuCoin Learn describes investing in a simulated stock exchange inside the game, alongside upgrading the virtual Musk character. Later the game added avatars based on other figures from the crypto world, among them Telegram CEO Pavel Durov and Vitalik Buterin. OKX's guide mentions Musk-themed and personalised AI avatars. It also describes earning X coins through daily quests and by connecting a TON wallet.

The token launch slipped from the originally expected September 2024 to 24 October 2024 at 12:00 UTC. The game's mining phase ended on 30 September 2024. Two days later the developers cited unexpected delays and opened a short season called the chill phase, which reset every player's progress to zero. X Empire announced on 11 October 2024 that the token would launch on TON on 24 October, together with the airdrop to players.

According to the project, the total supply of X is 690 billion tokens. Of these, 75%, or 517.5 billion, went to players across the mining and chill phases, including an extra 5% for chill-phase participants. The remainder was reserved for new users and the next phases of the game. TonAPI shows a supply of about 689,999,997,443 tokens on the contract. At launch the team said the game had over 50 million players, and about 6 million of them were reportedly eligible for the airdrop.

X went live on TON on 24 October 2024. Before that it traded on pre-market platforms; Decrypt cites pre-market trading on KuCoin and Bitget. A report published on 18 October 2024 named five exchanges where X would trade from that date: OKX, Bybit, Bitget, Gate and KuCoin. Bitget lists X in its Innovation and TON Ecosystem Zone with an X/USDT spot pair. The airdrop drew criticism. Many players complained on social media that their allocations were small, some reporting $10 or less. Decrypt compared the reaction with the Hamster Kombat and Catizen airdrops.

At launch the developers said they planned various Telegram apps with exclusive perks for X holders, such as a news feed and a language-learning app. On 24 October 2024 they also wrote "One month until something big". Decrypt linked to a post in the team's Telegram channel empirex, in which the team teased another upcoming announcement.