‘Strava Meets Pokémon Go’: Stepn Has 3 Million Users, But Its Token Is Down 97%

If you’re in an NFT space, you may not have heard of it Stepn Now. The NFT-based fitness app will be released within 6 months and will have 3 million monthly active users. This is impressive for an app that requires you to buy an NFT just to use it.

The app, described by CMO Shiti Manghani as “Strava meets Pokémon Go,” was very popular on CryptoTwitter and Web3 circles in April.

“It’s almost surreal,” Mangani said in the latest episode. DecryptionGm podcast. “Looking at the macro environment, taking a step back, it took the airplane industry 68 years to reach 50 million users. Twitter took about two years, then Pokemon Go took months. Web3 as a whole It’s squeezing the space for compound interest growth, because it gives everything back to the user. “

But it was April. In the first week of May, Stepn’s GST (Green Satoshi) tokens were off the cliff as the crypto market stagnated and Terra’s ecosystem collapsed. It is currently trading at $ 0.18, down 97% from its all-time high of nearly $ 9 on April 28.

The mechanism of Stepn is to get a part of GST by walking, jogging, or running. The amount of GST you earn depends on the level of NFT sneakers you purchase. Back in April, Web3 people boasted about making $ 30 on Crypto Twitter just to get it done. The entry price for one of Stepn’s NFT sneakers (sold at SOL) was a stunning $ 600 at the time, but GST’s highs allowed us to get the money back in just a month or so. ..

Currently, GST is 18 cents and you can earn less than $ 1 by running a few miles on entry-level sneakers.

But app proponents say Stepn means something more important. It’s an NFT test case with real practicality. Many people in the NFT field believe that this is the direction of NFT. Beyond pure digital flex, whether it’s “GameFi” or face-to-face event tickets, it goes into the realm of real-life use cases.

Manghani calls this app “an investment in health with an NFT mindset.”

“Some people may wonder why they pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for monkey JPEGs, or, if anything, hundreds of thousands of dollars for wall art,” she said. “There are different ways of thinking about digital money, crypto money and NFTs, and how we use them for positive gains and for social impact is what we are solving.”

Stepn also invites new entrants to join cryptocurrencies and NFTs, but it may not be as many as when GST was much more valuable. According to Mangani, one-third of app users are “Non-encrypted native. ”

They are attracted to applying digital tokens to field activities (Stepn does not work on treadmills, you have to walk, jog, or run outside). “”It’s the exact opposite of this dystopian myth of Ready Player One, “Mangani said,” about 100,000 people are running every minute. In fact, Metaverse.. “

To keep growing and avoid being completely tied to the price of tokens, Stepn is another “creature battle game like Axie Infinity where users need to buy three gamepiece NFTs to play. You need to avoid the pitfalls of the “Play Tour” game. After soaring prices of active users and tokens in the game Then plunged,platform Made a big changeIncludes a free “Starter Axie” to get people started.

According to Mangani, the activation code (which you can’t sign up yet unless you get the code from someone) was one of the many “hard calls” Stepn took to avoid speculators. “Honestly, it’s very easy for us to sit down and just be wild … you might hear it, but it’s actually easy. What we did One difficulty is actually concentrating the influx of users so that new users do not become the exit liquidity of old users. We are absolutely biased about supply and demand. “

One sweetener may be a social feature. Stepn doesn’t yet have an element to follow friends like Strava or Nike Running Club. Mangani says they will come soon.