STEPN Interview: Announcement About Partnership with Major Brand Soon
Today, we interview one of our portfolio projects, STEPN. With STEPN, anyone can earn valuable tokens with just their steps. It is one of the leading gaming apps on Solana, with 100K+ daily active users, and growing fast.
What is STEPN? How many are you and where are you based?
STEPN is a Web3 lifestyle app with Game-Fi and Social-Fi elements, users move outdoor to earn tokens that can be used to upgrade or mint new Sneakers.
The team has grown to over 55 people, we are based in UK, US, Australia, Singapore, China and Philippines.
What is STEPN trying to accomplish?
We are trying to build a portal to bridge Web2 normies to Web3 and at the same time, inspire millions to a healthier lifestyle and contribute positively to carbon neutrality.
Why is STEPN different from all play-to-earn games?
We didn’t sell our Genesis NFT, we gave them away – around 25 Sneakers a day, this enables us to start testing the app without the pressure of getting swamped by players trying to get their investment fund back.
We purposely reduced a lot of game and narrative elements from the app, making it both friendly to non-gamers and non-crypto users, this enables us to reach the friends and family of crypto native users with very low friction.
We discourage Guilds to be part of the ecosystem, because although Guilds can bring a lot of seed users, in long term, they will put a lot of pressure on the game economy, leading to value extraction. We also spend a lot of time finetuning our Anti-cheating mechanics, leaving only the genuine users within our ecosystem.
We do swift product feedback; we collect users’ feedback and analyze users’ data to bring rapid change to our in-game tokenomics/design to best suit users’ needs.
What is STEPN doing to reach out to non-crypto people? How are your marketing efforts going so far?
We made the app easy to use and teach, so that we can leverage our crypto native users to teach and buy Sneakers for their friends and family. These are our seed non-crypto users — these users, once they reach a certain scale, can start teaching their friends and gift them the Sneaker they freshly minted.
So far we haven’t done much marketing, all content is generated by our users.
How do you respond to critics that say that an app like STEPN doesn’t need crypto?
We definitely need crypto, to create a tokenomic that has a supply and demand, where people can buy and sell game assets with zero friction. We also need crypto to create a very strong network effect, where people can build their social graph revolving around their wallet addresses. NFT is one of the key elements of the app, which represents the digital ownership of users — and owning and trading it is the pillar of the app as well.
How do the rewards play out? Can you talk a bit about the goal of each token?
We give various rewards to users — there are the basic, such as GST the game token, and the upcoming GMT token earning; GST is used on almost all aspects of the app whereas GMT is used for high-level use scenarios in the app. There are also NFT rewards such as Gems, which can be traded on the NFT marketplace.
We also do airdrops from time to time to reward our loyal users, such as we have recently airdropped 45 million GMT to our early adaptors.
What are the plans you have to expand the game to a billion users?
By converting the app into an NFT and Social platform.
What makes you excited the most regarding STEPN?
I think scalability is the most exciting element, users can be taken on board with very little friction.
How do you see the potential threat of competitors and similar apps? What will make STEPN thrive as competitors catch up?
Not much of a threat as people are chasing high sustainable ROI, we believe we will be on the top of the list by providing long-lasting use cases and burning scenarios of GMT to maintain the high demand of GMT. This enables us to break out from the inflation curse of SLP – users will chase after GMT, which is a finite supplied token instead of the GST which has an unlimited supply. The halving mechanics also enables us to always have some token remaining to reward people in the long term.
10) Big sports brands like Nike and Adidas are known for shaping the market regarding walking and running. Do you see these players as a threat in the future?
You will see we have an announcement about this very soon.