StepN, a Solana-based app that rewards users with tokens for walking and running, says it has 2M-3M MAUs and makes $3M-5M/day in net profit from trading fees
But skeptics question its sustainability and whether it can be called a ‘game’ — Since its launch in December, StepN …
Context & Ripple Effects
StepN arrived into a market where investors had already put $7.3B into US-based fitness apps over five years — but almost all of that went to subscription and hardware plays, not apps that pay users in tokens. Launched on Solana in December, StepN instead charges users for NFT sneakers and skims a fee on every resale.
The self-reported numbers here — 2M-3M monthly actives and $3M-5M/day net profit — were later corroborated when STEPN disclosed $122.5M in Q2 2022 profits against $26M in Q1, alongside a plan to burn 5% of profits via GMT buybacks. A year on, the same app won the right to run in-app NFT trading on iOS, suggesting Apple softened its crypto stance toward exactly this kind of economy.
First-order effects
- StepN's revenue is a function of sneaker-trading volume, not subscriptions — so every one of those 2M-3M MAUs is simultaneously a customer and a source of transaction fees, and daily profit swings with token-market sentiment on Solana.
Second-order effects
- Solana gains a consumer workload that generates constant on-chain activity and fee flow, making StepN a showcase for the chain's retail throughput claims — and a bellwether whose user churn would show up in network activity.
Third-order effects
- A fee-on-resale model is structurally pro-cyclical: it works while new buyers enter to purchase sneakers, and the same mechanism that produced the reported profits amplifies any downturn — the sustainability question skeptics raise is about the loop, not the quarter.
The trend: Fitness apps are splitting into two models — subscription services versus token-based 'move-to-earn' economies whose revenue rides on in-app asset trading — with platform gatekeepers like Apple deciding how far the second model can go.