Move-to-earn Darling STEPN Has Under 350 New Users Per Day As GMT Momentum Sours...

The move-to-earn concept gained tremendous initial traction when it was still fresh. Unfortunately, projects in this space struggle to establish sustainable economies, like most play-to-earn games. As a result, STEPN, once one of the M2E frontrunners, has seen its traction dwindle significantly, with a slight improvement in sight. 

The Rise of STEPN

It is tricky for users to get excited over move-to-earn. Most people prefer a sedentary lifestyle and do not care much about fitness. Even a monetary incentive, like crypto tokens, will not be sufficient to get people to be more active. More specifically, they will often try such an app but never sustain the positive life change for long. 

STEPN tried to capitalize on this momentum through the introduction of Web3 elements. The app is advertised as a “lifestyle app with social and game elements.” However, it is primarily designed to get people to walk, jog, and run more often. Users who do so will earn native tokens and loot boxes to upgrade their NFT shoes and collection.

Unfortunately, the STEPN ecosystem is a pay-to-play move-to-earn title. Users need to buy a shoe NFT before they can earn tokens. That approach makes being more active an unwelcome chore, as the initial investment needs to be recuperated. Moreover, the a often suffers from less-than-accurate GPS tracking, and its anti-cheat solution can misidentify legitimate physical effort. 

That said, the STEPN ecosystem has a more significant issue to solve. Like most other NFT-based projects, there is no significant long-term utility for the tokens or NFTs. For example, users who want a healthy lifestyle will earn rewards but not necessarily use them. Instead, they dump them on the open market to get real money. Additionally, the ecosystem needs to attract new users to make its NFTs long-term viable. 

Momentum Stalls 

Given those aspects, it isn’t surprising to see STEPN’s momentum dwindle. The asset has suffered a near 15% setback in the past month. Additionally, its overall market volume is down by over 45%. There is little interest in the GMT token or what it represents, as its use cases remain very limited. One may argue they only cater to crypto users rather than the mainstream. 

Such a price decrease is not unique to STEPN. It affects all projects in the space without long-term vision or viability. Moreover, STEPN users have expressed less bullish sentiment – down 36.5% – and more bearish sentiment – +6.6% – confirming a bleak short-term GMT outlook. Combined with an overall social decline across Twitter (-23.8%), Reddit (-38.7%), and Medium (-30%), things do not look great. 

Making matters worse are the monthly active users. STEPN saw its MAU increase from 2.500 to 705,452 between January 2022 and May 2022. Since then, the numbers have gone backward, dropping below 100,000 in September 2022. That is still a healthy number – on paper – but further illustrates the dwindling interest in pay-to-play move-to-earn titles. There are under 350 daily new users for STEPN today. 

User figures for October look somewhat positive – almost 52,000 so far – but it remains unclear if they surpass September’s MAU. The chart above confirms there aren’t many new users joining the ecosystem. Instead, the app is kept relevant by existing users, but for how long?

Trading Popularity Shifts

One intriguing aspect is the trading pairs for GMT with the most volume. It is good to see STEPN gain ground in fiat pairings through the Korean Won and USDT. 

One can argue USDT is not a fiat currency but a stablecoin tied to the US Dollar is as good as – if not better than – fiat currency. However, it indicates people won’t go out of their way to convert other crypto assets to GMT and back. 

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