Running with the NFT Fitness App for 2 Months

In April, everyone on Crypto Twitter was bragging about how much money they were making by going for a run and using “move-to-earn” Stepn. The app gives you GST (Green Satoshi) tokens when you walk, jog, or run outside. Some Web3 workers were getting more than $20 in GST each time they went to work.

But this happened in April, when the GST rate was nearly $9.

It went down to $3.50 by the time the wirter of this news started using the app on May 10. (late to the party). For his first run of 2.5 miles, he got 0.65 GST, which is $2.27. Still, it’s “free” money for somethinghe was going to do anyway. Then, GST kept going down during the larger crypto meltdown. When he finished his third run on Stepn on May 1, GST was 97 cents. It’s worth 8 cents now. (Can this get to zero? Absolutely.)

In eight runs on Stepn that ranged from 1.6 to 3.6 miles, he has earned 31 GST, which are worth $2.17 at the moment.

Before you can use Stepn, you have to buy a shoe NFT that is parked on Solana and costs SOL. When he got mine at the end of April, SOL was close to $100, so he hesitate to tell you how much he paid for his sneaker: more than $400. Researching the market is important!

People who started using Stepn early would talk about how quickly they planned to get their money back from their shoe NFT and start making money. At the price of bitcoin right now, I’llhe wil get his money back in 363 months, which is about 30 years. The software also tries to get you to spend more money by making you “fix” your shoe or buy another one so you can “level up.”

If the tokenomics aren’t enough to turn you off (it makes you think of a Ponzi scheme), the UX is much worse than major Web2 fitness apps like Nike Running Club and Strava. (Now, when he runs, he uses all three apps.) Stepn doesn’t have any social tools yet, and it only shows stats in kilometers, even though CMO Shiti Maghani said on the gm podcast in June that they get in the way. These goods, like Axie Infinity, which started the interesting but troublesome “play-to-earn” model, require customers to buy in before they can even try out the app or game to see if they like it.

he thinks that NFTs will be around for a long time and will become much more than the wealth flex of PFPs like Bored Apes. we haven’t seen the most interesting uses of the technology yet, whether it’s for tickets (as Mark Cuban thinks), gaming, the metaverse, or something else.

he loves the idea of using an NFT to get into a community or club. During NFT NYC last month, many parties only let people in who owned a certain NFT, and they used apps like Tokenproof to prove ownership. Stepn’s mistake, he thinks was that it priced its sneaker admission ticket way too high; the trend now is toward NFTs with more reasonable prices.

the writer believes Stepn’s significance as symbolic. We’re still in the early stages of the token economy, and people like Axie Infinity and Stepn should be praised for trying to figure it out, even though someone will come along later and do it better.

That’s why Axie and Stepn are making big changes to their businesses to attract the next generation of crypto-curious people. Axie gave new users free beginning NFTs, and Stepn will buy back and burn its GMT governance token and add Ethereum compatibility.