'What would encourage you to do more exercise? The obvious answer, say the founders of STEPN, is cold hard cash. Their move-to-earn running app offers its users cash rewards to get more active and has already persuaded millions of people to sign up in the space of just a few months.' Reported from Forbes news. If you like to keep your ear to the ground and spot the latest trends on the internet, you may have seen Stepn pop up in your universe recently. The fitness app has grown to more than 300,000 daily active users in a few months.
Stepn is an Australia-Based startup that offers a blockchain-based fitness app, founded by two young Chinese boys Yawn Rong and Jerry Huang, who are now living in Adelaide. It was just founded in 2021, and now Stepn has raised a total of $5M in funding over 1 round.
STEPN founders Yawn Rong and Jerry Huang
STEPN is a Web3 lifestyle app with Social-Fi and Game-Fi elements. 'To participate, users must download the STEPN app and then buy a virtual pair of sneakers in the form of a non-fungible token (NFT). Once they’ve done that, each time they go for a walk, jog or run outside, STEPN’s GPS tracking and motion sensor technology monitors how far they have travelled and rewards them with tokens. These tokens can then be spent inside the game – on upgraded sneakers, for example – or cashed out into hard currency.'
'The potential rewards on offer look enticing. Rong says the minimum that users can expect to earn is $25 for 10 minutes of activity and that some users are earning as much as $4,500 a day. But many people don’t take all the cash, he adds. They use their earnings to acquire new NFTs within the game, take part in trading with other players, and elect to give some of their cash to good causes.'
CEO Yawn Rong talked about balancing many aspects through STEPN’s app development. Credit: STEPN
Since the inception of the smartphone, lots of start-ups have attempted to crack the trillion dollar fitness industry with a varying amount of success. Stepn’s approach tries to allow users to profit from their activity. Blending the world of crypto, NFTs and fashion, Stepn claims to be the new dawn in the fitness industry.' Pip, the blockchain and cryptocurrency blogger said.
Now, Stepn is backed by some very successful venture capital firms, and according to their website the current Beta is just a fraction of their plans with the app. They have already signed a partnership with ASICS to create some in-game sneakers for users to purchase with their earned currency. With the success of the app so far, it’s easy to imagine that lots of other sports brands will follow suit. In fact, one of its key advisors is Scott Dunlap the VP at adidas.
As of writing, STEPN x ASICS Sneaker #11914 is worth 1200 BNB or $484,320. Credit: Binance NFT Marketplace
'Stepn's native token, green metaverse token (GMT), is changing hands at around $2.20, roughly 17 times where it started trading at in March, although it has retreated from its all-time high of about $4.11 last month.' Reported by Lyllah Ledesma, from CoinDesk, on May 11, 2022.
“This actually has value in the long run,” said Will McEvoy, senior associate at the independent investment research firm Fundstrat. “Price stability is important because if the price were to fluctuate 50% a week, it would incentivize users to pull out.”
Mohammad Noor, a freelance virtual assistant based in Bangladesh, India, said he heard about Stepn on YouTube and was attracted to the app because he saw it as a good side hustle that could also improve his health.
“Jogging is essential to me and now I earn money to do it,” Noor, 35, said in an interview with CoinDesk. He said he earns around $75 a day from jogging twice a day for 30 minutes each time.
He thinks Stepn has a bright future because the app is earning money from users in more than just one way – minting shoes, selling shoes and from refilling users' energy. “It seems that the developers learnt lessons from other play-to-earn projects that failed,” Noor said.
The whole game ecosystem of Stepn is extremely detailed, ambitious and elaborate - they have simply thought of everything.
Play-to-earn NFT games give users the chance to generate an income stream through playing. Typically, a player is rewarded with tokens and occasionally NFTs, earning more the longer they play. The tokens earned are often needed as part of the game's crafting process.
Play-to-earn has transformed the gaming industry over the last year. Starting off with Axie Infinity, the sector has grown so vast that new games seem to be popping up everywhere you look.
Axie Infinity follows a model similar to Pokemon with collectible creatures and battles. Axie Infinity is on the Ethereum blockchain and provides users a potential income based on trading Small Love Potions (SLP), Axies, and Axie Infinity Shards (AXS). SLP and AXS are both available to trade on Binance.
Under the hood, the games have suffered lots of teething issues with their economies lacking in certain areas. Creating the perfect game economy is very difficult and may even be impossible.
The problem with Play To Earn is that often the games are beholden to external economic factors which can at times mean the game can be either hard for new users, expensive or not profitable. Generally, the concept is currently being experimented by different games and there isn’t going to be one perfect solution.
Stepn is similar to so-called play-to-earn (p2e) games where players can earn cryptocurrency rewards from playing video games in the sense that users partake in an activity and earn a passive income from it. According to McEvoy, however, Stepn has a much longer trajectory than p2e games like Axie Infinity.
The app has repurposed the p2e model with a lifestyle and fitness peg that encourages users to exercise. Get off the couch, in other words.
“The runway for Stepn is much longer than the runway of Axie,” McEvoy said. “This is because the total addressable market of people who would use Stepn is bigger than those who would use Axie.
“Over a billion people walk, and half a billion use fitness tracking apps on their smartphones. There you have 500 million people that this makes sense for,” McEvoy said.
Axie Infinity had some reasonable success last year but they struggled towards the end of the year once the crypto market started to turn consistently bearish. The game ecosystem and tokenomics were stress tested and this started to show a few cracks in the system. They were eventually hacked and 600 million dollars was stolen, which isn’t necessarily relevant. However, this is one of the risks for any of these concepts.
When we heard about the rise of MoveToEarn games like Stepn we were instantly cautious of the concept, they will likely encounter the same pitfalls that the PlayToEarn industry has had. However, looking at the vast plans for the game and the ecosystem, it looks like the creators (who are backed by some heavy hitters) have at least tried to make the game dynamic with lots of ways to profit and earn.
One issue with betting on the GMT tokens, according to Fundstrat’s analysts, is that they can be difficult to value.
Although they have a limited supply of 6 billion tokens, the Stepn developers can change the rules of the game.
“In a sense the Stepn developers play the role of a central bank, pulling demand-side levers that either support asset prices or cool them off, much like the Fed,” McEvoy said. “This makes it difficult to predict how the token will play out.”
Already, the developers have changed the amount of GMT required for in-game upgrades. Increasing the amount of GMT needed to level up users' sneakers boosts demand for the tokens.
GMT gets burnt when spent on level ups within the game, which decreases the overall supply of the token.
“This type of change should have a positive impact on price and needs to be considered when valuing GMT,” McEvoy said.
At the end of the day, a market is a market and often there is very little that can be done to control it, or make it fair. The entry level sneaker purchase to start the game is already quite expensive, but Stepn says they aren’t worried by this, perhaps because the game is going through its ‘mania’ phase and the price will settle down eventually.
“The app has plans to integrate more socialfi elements into its platform and will roll out exciting features for non-native crypto users to facilitate their onboarding onto the Web3 world.” Says Rong, the founder.
The founders are also keen to stress their green credentials. As well as STEPN’s use of Solana, widely seen as a more environmentally-friendly blockchain, the business gives users the opportunity to donate some of the profit pool to buying carbon removal credits.
We aren’t sure exactly how this will work as Stepn haven’t revealed any details but you can be sure that it will involve some sort of social or pvp type element. Next, there is an entire marketplace where you can trade sneakers, rent sneakers and even a credit system.
It’s difficult to predict whether Stepn will be successful in the long-term but its governance token $GMT has been one of the only highlights of a bearish crypto market this year. However, there is a lot we can learn from the gaming industry to understand exactly the pitfalls that Stepn may encounter as the game gets more popular.
There is no wearables app yet which is a huge miss right now but it looks like Stepn will introduce an Apple Watch feature later on this year. That feature will definitely attract more runners and joggers to start using this app instead of traditional sports tracker. If you can earn money when you run as your daily routine, why not!
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