Stepn is a move to earn game, which was published on Solana hackathon initially. After several times updates, Stepn launched its open test by the end of 2021 and has quickly hit 60k+ users and 1 billion post-money valuation at this moment, it has clearly becomes a phenomenal App.
Apart from stepn’s development background, there is another interesting point: why Stepn choose Solana as its backed blockchain?
Well, unlike Axie Infinity, Stepn’s founder said that they will never build their own blockchain, since Solana already support NFTs protocols and has relatively quick transaction and low gas fee, which are exactly what Stepn need.
Release time：
2021.11 - Early assess
2021.12 - Open test
Category：
move to earn
Token：
GMT (governance)
GST (usage)
Similar to Web2 fitness applications, Stepn tracks our movements, steps and routes by monitoring the GPS location and acceleration sensors in our phones.
So here comes to the question, how Stepn differentiate from other Web2 APPs?
Well, first of all, you have to buy a pair of NFT shoes (named as sneaker) before actually walking and earning, then you need to adjust your walk speed according to the attributes of your shoes, quicker or slower speed will both affect your GST rewards (Stepn’s token, catch up later).
Apart from that, Stepn has a built-in APP wallet, users can freely transfer their GSTs into other tokens, DEX and CEX are also supported. You can also re-invest your GST into the game by improving shoes’ attributes, which will later affects your earning curve, as shown in the following:
Efficiency: determines how many GSTs you could earn, more efficiency means more GSTs
Lucky: determines the probability to get a mystery box
comfort: being useful after you hit 30 levels, higher comfort value, more GMTs(governance token) you could get.
Resilience: Shoes’ degeneration rate, higher resilience value means slower degeneration rate
As for the token usage, users need to spend their GSTs to repair their shoes and prolong shoes’ life span. GST can also be used to get new shoes, if you have two pairs of level 5+ sneakers, you can spend GST to synthesize new sneakers, the more sneakers you have, the more energy you have every day, earn GST every day the longer the time.
Stepn uses the dual-token model, GST is in-game token and GMT is used for governance.
GST: in-game token, infinite supply
GMT: governance token, limited supply (6,000,000,000 in total)
Following are the detailed GMT distribute and release diagrams:
30% for users to move and earn
30% to Eco-system & Treasury (not sure how to use it)
16.3% private sale
14.2% to the team
7% to Binance Launchpad Sale (Public Sale)
2.5% to advisors
macro-control measure:
When the token GST price rises too fast, the project party will carry out 2x efficiency, 2x energy and other beneficial activities to reduce the expectation of GST rise by increasing players' income, so as to control the price of GST;
When user growth is too fast compared to the existing user base, the project party will restart the invitation code system to control the growth of new users and ensure smooth user growth to maintain stable economic growth;
For the token GMT surge, there is no need to regulate it in the short term, because the current operation of the game mainly relies on the token GST, and the short-term surge of GMT will not have a great impact on the sustainable development of the game.
Production & Consumption Mechanism:
Repairs, upgrades, gem and slot matching, etc. encourage players to consume tokens, and the cost of improving the ability of players to earn tokens is gradually increasing. This mechanism is reflected in many places in the game (such as the cost of upgrading is getting higher and higher , the higher the quality, the higher the repair cost, the more shoes produced, the higher the cost, etc.), through this form of "the rich pay more tax", the effect of more production and consumption of tokens is achieved, which is conducive to maintaining the output of tokens The dynamic balance of consumption and consumption promotes the sustainable and healthy development of the game.
In order to reduce the token output, Stepn limits the daily energy amount and the number of tokens earned by users. Players need to increase the amount of energy and token rewards at the same time in order to maximize profits, and the ways to increase energy and token rewards are different. The former is by improving the quantity and quality of sneakers, and the latter is by upgrading, which will be conducive to incentives. Players participate in more gameplay, which also promotes the consumption of tokens. At the same time, the growth rate of the daily energy limit is lower than the growth rate of the number of sports shoes, which means that if you want to obtain a higher energy limit in the later stage, you need to pay more.
Sneakers participating in "breeding" must have complete durability, and durability is also required for participating in marathons (players are prohibited from repairing sneakers during the competition). This rule encourages players to repair to speed up the consumption of GST tokens, while users multiply The more shoes you have, the higher the cost of production, and each user can only perform a maximum of 7 breeding new shoes activities, thus limiting the output of sneakers and tokens.
Players need to consume energy during exercise. When the energy is exhausted, they will not be able to earn token rewards. The energy will be recovered at a rate of 25% every 6 hours at a fixed time point.
Token withdraw mechanism:
Earned tokens GST and GMT can be directly converted into stable currency USDC in the wallet of its APP
DEX Raydium and Orca also support the exchange of the token GST with USDC. STEPN sneakers are divided into levels 0~30, and only when level 30 is reached, players can earn governance tokens GMT.
The STEPN project party also transferred the transaction of sports shoes from the NFT trading platform Magic Eden to the self-developed trading market in the early stage, and taxed 6% of each transaction as the main income of the treasury.
Sneakers use the token SOL as a medium of exchange. Considering the value of the token SOL, the handling fee charged by the project party is equivalent to "foreign exchange reserves", similar to the recent purchase of BTC by Terra, which can be used to interfere with economic factors when necessary price to maintain the stability of the entire system.
The answer is: no, unless Stepn change its mechanism totally.
For how long Stepn lasts, we can discuss and analyze it mainly through the following aspects.
First of all, the overall context, will the entire crypto market become a bull market or a bear market? If the crypto market falls into a bear market, which is not impossible to happen at this moment, it will be clearly unfavorable for Stepn. Whether it is a new entry or an existing one, there will not be enough income and motivation to prop it up to find fun in Stepn (for those people who claims that they spend 1500+ dollars just in order to go for a walk and keep fit, I would say, well, good luck :)
Secondly, Stepn is quite earnings-focused, one could tell from its white paper, to its social media, community and game mechanism. It lacks meaningful gameplay or non-financial game-typical utility like fun, distraction or social factors which could attract non-ROI-related, in-game spending (e.g. cosmetics) to reduce the token supply. STEPN’s social media is full of examples that show that show the shared purpose of the STEPN community which is entirely based on maximizing yield efficiency. Beginning with a Ponzi, Stepn did not show us a strong willing to change its Ponzi game into a holistic and healthy eco-system.
At last, even if we just think about Stepn inside system, the following problems may also arise in the near future:
Price: Sneakers now is too expensive, and the threshold for new users is relatively high, which will lead to a decrease in the price of shoes. Although it could be alleviated by leasing in the future, it will results in other problems such as professional guilds and token price crisis.
Number: A great number of new shoes are produced every day, if there are not enough new users come into the game, which definitely will result in a quick collapse.
Rarity: The number of shoes with high attributes increases rapidly, and those shoes could generate far more GST than normal ones. So as long as the daily amount of GST generated is more than the consumption amount, GST price will become quite fluctuate and will result in the quick collapse.
Stepn is a superstar of Gamefi filed this year with no doubt. It’s elegant design and dedicated game mechanism, smart marketing strategy that combining Stepn with health and fitness, all give users more excuses to buy those luxury sneakers.
According to Stepn, they want to build the Stepn as the base for whole socialfi eco-system, while according to their roadmap and AMAs, it still has a long way to go.
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