The digital world was excited when the prospect of virtual and augmented reality edged closer to reality with the announcement of the metaverse late last year. Since then, NFT projects have been working to integrate their tokens and avatars to prepare the metaverse.
Stepn is an NFT project that strives to incorporate augmented reality with play-to-earn gaming to create a unique user experience.
App developer FindSatoshi Lab built the project on the Solana platform. It allows users to earn money through various activities for a specific period that refreshes every 24 hours. For example, users on the app can earn revenue by walking, jogging, or running.
Stepn users can get their rewards through its native cryptocurrency, the GST, which gets credited to a wallet created in-game or imported externally. However, players must first get an NFT sneaker to play the game, boosting the amount of GST earned per session by upgrading their sneakers.
The Stepn NFT sneakers are tradable on secondary markets and have already commanded high prices that range from $400 to $100,000. Users will have to upgrade their sneakers to maximize its characteristics, including resilience, luck, comfort, efficiency, and energy.
Energy is the most important of the characteristics as one unit equals five minutes. Players start with two energy units. Stepn users will have to buy more sneakers and balance the cost of new energy slots with potential gains from longer earning sessions to gain more energy.
Prospective players will have to use SOL, GST, and GMT to master Stepn. GST offers an unlimited supply while GMT is capped at 6 billion. Additionally, GMT will only award users who upgrade their sneakers past level 30.
Although the concept of Stepn is bound to generate success, the project faced trouble in China following the crypto market crash. Additionally, Chinese data laws that prohibit the storage of citizens’ GPS data forced the project to block Chinese users.
Stepn also suffered a series of distributed denial-of-service or DDoS attacks after its launch, forcing the developers to warn users that their exercises may not be recorded properly during maintenance.
