On April 6, the venture capital division of Finance announced investments in the Move-to-Earn STEP N project. Financial details of the transaction were not disclosed.
"We believe that the gamification of physical activity can attract more people to the industry, accelerating the mass adoption of blockchain technologies and cryptocurrencies," said Bill Qian, head of Binance Labs.
STEPN is an application that encourages a healthy lifestyle, which includes elements of Game—Fi and Social-Fi. The whole gameplay is built around digital sneakers in the form of NFT. NFT data allows users to earn in-game GST currency by jogging or hiking. Sneakers have four main characteristics:
attribute;
type;
rare;
level.
Together with the Energy system, which introduces a daily income limit, these characteristics affect the amount of GST that a user can earn.
The application requires stable operation of the GPS system. Because of this, a restriction has been introduced: with low GPS quality, the earning rate can decrease up to 0. The earnings of players can also be regulated by the developers.
The GST token has risen in price by 56% over the past two weeks, as of April 7, the value of the asset is $ 5.34.
The origin of the Move-to-Earn trend
The trend for Move-to-Earn appeared not so long ago, but gradually draws interest from Play-to-Earn projects to itself. Physical activity underwent gamification (introduction of a game element) a few years ago. Nintendo popularized motion-based games by publishing Pokemon GO in 2016. Players from all over the world caught Pokemon by tracking them on a GPS map in real time.
The share of M2E projects in the market
According to the coingecko website, the entire M2E sphere has a market capitalization of $1.5 billion. At the same time, the total valuation of digital assets reaches $2.09 trillion.
STEPN accounts for $1.3 billion of the capitalization of M2E projects. The second largest is Genopets with a capitalization of $49 million. Like STEPN, Genopets is built on the Solana blockchain. Genopets is a little more complicated than STEPN, there are also pets and lands on which they will live. Another feature is that your steps are converted not directly into an asset, but into an experience for your genopet, an analogue of Tamagotchi. The more active you are, the more development your pet will receive. The main source of income in Genopets is the sale of developed pets.
In the wake of STEPN's success, there are more and more projects using the Move-to-Earn model. SkateX will encourage skateboarding, WIRTUAL provides the opportunity to compete with other players in sports such as running, cycling and swimming.
How to evaluate the success of the project?
Traditionally, the number of active users is a measure of the success of an application. But in tokenized ecosystems, most users come for financial rewards. A lot of P2E games grew rapidly and also fell rapidly when the inflation of their game currency became unstable.
M2E games are still at a very early stage of development, but of all M2E projects, STEPN is the closest to a full-fledged game. Earnings happen in real time, and its tokens are really useful in the game. And projects such as Genopets and WIRTUAL have not yet launched the full use of tokens.
M2E took into account the mistakes of many P2E projects and introduced mechanisms for the use of tokens, burning tokens to support the economy. STEPN has introduced an effective system of repairing and improving sneakers for a token from the very beginning. Genopets will allow land owners to earn only KI directly, limiting inflation. WIRTUAL will also offer several options for storing and using WIR.
OliveX, an Australian company listed on the stock exchange, is already building a "Fitness Metaverse". Part of this metaverse includes a set of planned fitness games based on their future DOSE token. One such game is Dustland Rider, an MMORPG-based cycling game that connects to a real bike and Bluetooth sensors. Augmented and virtual reality technologies can also be used for M2E games in the future.1
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