Walk to Earn is a new diversion of Play to Earn, where you earn by hitting your steps. The concept of getting paid for being active isn’t new though. With apps like Charity Miles, Healthy Wage, Evidation, and many more, earning rewards by reaching your fitness goals has been possible for over 13 years. With the ever-increasing popularity of blockchain and NFTs, this concept has gained a second wind but this time it’s narrowed to just walking or running. There are a few arguably successful walking apps that have implemented blockchain technology and NFTs to incentivise users to go outside and walk more. In this review, I will compare three walking apps that I’ve tested and will share my honest opinion on each of them. These apps are Stepn, Sweatcoin, and Aglet.
Stepn calls itself a Web3 lifestyle app with SocialFi and GameFi elements. It pays you in GST and GMT, the in-game tokens that you can either spend on virtual sneakers/boosters, or swap to USDT. To start earning you need to purchase a sneaker. This is where some people may be turned off as they can’t afford the purchase or don’t think it will be worth it. The price for a sneaker has reached 12 SOL when SOL was about $100. That was quite the investment. Currently, thanks to the crash, they’re about 3-4 SOL and SOL is at <$100 so the price is not as steep but is still significant. The developers, however, have announced that they are working to add a renting feature soon. This is good but by the time they actually do it, it could be too little too late…
There are four different categories of sneakers that have a certain required speed to earn GST. There are Walkers that require 1-6 km/h, Joggers that require 4-10 km/h, Runners that require 8-20 km/h, and Trainers that require 1-20 km/h. Latter ones are the most universal, and hence, more people want to have them, but as you could probably guess, the marketplace is filled with Runners that suit the least amount of people. You’d be able to find a Walker though, which is what I got myself.
When picking a sneaker, you should look at its attributes and preferably look for a sneaker with better stats, as they will increase your earnings. There are four attributes: Efficiency (enhances GST earning), Luck (enhances Mystery Box drop rate), Comfort (enhances GMT earning but only at lvl 30), and Resilience (reduces repair costs).
Now, what’s GST and GMT? GST is the token that you earn when walking. The supply of GST is infinite, but the burning mechanism is in place as players can repair, mint, or level up sneakers in exchange for burning some tokens. You can also swap it to SOL and mint another sneaker, or swap to USDT. GMT is the governance token, which is limited to 6 billion and can only be earned with a lvl 30 sneaker. Again, to level up your sneaker, you need GST.
GMT is built to have more value than GST, which motivates newcomers to earn more GST and level up. That in my opinion works well, but the issue lies somewhere else. This concept in its current state is an axie-clone, or better known as a Ponzi scheme – it works when there is user growth and more players are buying sneakers, but as soon as they start selling more than buying, the whole system crashes and you lose your investment.
Stepn users have been seeing a huge growth due to the increased number of newcomers that put their money into buying a sneaker, hence increasing the demand, and reducing supply. The team hasn't really done anything that would pump the tokens other than the current scheme that’s been working for the time being.
I do believe that this project has potential but they need to focus on creating greater utility for their token and sneakers. This can be done through partnerships with other metaverse projects or with existing fashion labels and sports brands. Speaking to other users of Stepn, there seems to be a slight bond between a user and his sneaker (as each sneaker has its own uniqueness and requires maintenance), much like how some people may feel attached to their sneakers in the real world. Working to increase the gamification and utility elements of the app would help leverage on this bond tremendously (much like tomagochie #tb). To totally purge the axie system though, I believe it would be better if they considered transitioning to a free-to-play with pay-to-enjoy elements instead. This would of course require a total overhaul of the system and it is therefore not entirely clear what a more equitable version of the app would look like.
I shall also mention that in order to earn, you need to go onto the app and press start whenever you’re about to start moving. You can’t do it for an unlimited time as you'd be using energy that refills every few hours. This isn’t too bad, it requires you to adapt and manually finish your session and restart it when you’re on the move/refilled again.
Sweatcoin is a free and simple app which rewards your daily steps with cryptocurrency that you can spend on physical products, donate to charity, or convert into SWEAT tokens.
I’ve had the app for a while and at this point I have around 1,500 sweatcoins. The beautiful thing is, I hadn’t opened the app for months and it still counted my steps and rewarded me with the tokens daily. I really like this because I didn’t put much effort in and now I can afford any products that they have in their offers section. The usual price for an offer is 5-200 sweatcoins – and, as mentioned earlier, you can also convert it into crypto so the more sweatcoins you have, the more actual money you’re going to get (hopefully). Although it’s hard to tell, how much you need to have in order to get a decent amount of crypto (by decent I mean a good amount of money worth of tokens, where “good” is subjective)
Let’s go back to the offers. It’s always something to do with healthy living – for example, food supplements, skincare products, fitness watches, neck massagers or sportswear etc. Some offers give you 100% discount – only pay for shipping, some give you 50% off – usually on more expensive products, but even that is pretty cool! I’ve used a few offers to purchase free vitamins, free fitness tea and some other things. I’m happy!
Another cool feature that I mentioned earlier is that you can donate to charities. You don’t need to donate actual money, instead, you donate your sweatcoins – so you don’t lose anything and help someone who needs it. I don’t know how it works though since the token hasn’t launched and it isn’t currently worth anything. My assumption is that the company will donate their own funds that will be equivalent to the price of the total donated amount of sweatcoins when SWEAT gets released.