STEPN: Peak Covid-Era Crypto Mania
In the spring of 2022, people were paying thousands for sneakers that existed only inside an app called STEPN. The app watched your GPS while you walked and paid you crypto for the mileage. "Move-to-earn", they called it, and by its own count a couple million people were lacing up imaginary shoes every month.
The math underneath was the oldest math there is: your walking income came from whoever bought sneakers after you did. STEPN dressed this up with dual tokens and minting mechanics and daily "energy" caps, and while the dressing was clever, the machine still needed an endless line of new buyers. Lines like that have one ending.
It arrived by summer. The earning token gave back something like 99% of its peak, thousand-dollar sneakers became lunch-money sneakers, and the influencers who had been posting screenshots of their morning-walk income found other things to post about.
What sticks with me is the season where it worked anyway. People who had never voluntarily exercised in their lives were outside at 6 a.m. hitting ten thousand steps because an app owed them money. Every legitimate fitness product on earth struggles to produce that behavior, and a Ponzi wearing running shoes produced it in weeks. Nobody got to keep the money.
Weirdly, STEPN never crossed my path, even though this is exactly the type of stuff I would have been caught up in during my time in the crypto space. Probably a good thing, the horror stories of people losing thousands buying, repairing, and trying to sell virtual sneakers seems like something I want no part in.
Source: stepn.com
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