As the crypto bear market continues and STEPN’s user base falls from its previous highs, the Solana blockchain-based move-to-earn fitness program STEPN is laying off over a hundred contract workers.
According to the crypto reporter Colin Wu, there will be less money invested into STEPN, and moderators and ambassadors will be terminated from their positions.
Wu, who cited community sources supporting his assertion, said there would also be a move toward supporting Find Satoshi Lab (FSL), the company that owns STEPN, and all of its future endeavors.
The Australian fintech company, Find Satoshi Lab introduced STEPN in 2021. It allowed users to buy “sneakers” embedded with nonfungible tokens (NFTs) that can be worn while walking or running to earn Green Satoshi Tokens (GSTs) that can be utilized in-game or cashed out.
According to data compiled by CoinGecko, the all-time high price of STEPN’s governance token, Green Metaverse Token (GMT), was $4.11 in April, while GST’s fee peaked at $8.51. This success for STEPN began shortly after its initial introduction.
In the meantime, GST has collapsed by 99% to $0.026, while GMT has fallen over 85% to $0.61 per share.
According to Dune Analytics, the number of people using the app every day went from a high of 105,257 on June 26 to less than 6,000 in September. However, as of October 5, there was a subsequent rise to 11,877 users.
Of recent setbacks are a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack in June and a requirement to impose access restrictions on users in mainland China. According to crypto researcher Lucia Kim of the self-proclaimed Web3-native accelerator “nonce Classic“, the drop could be due to the constraints of STEPN.
On October 4, Kim tweeted extensively detailing how the system was designed to force users to sell tokens in the market to claim prizes. This increased supply and led to an accelerated decrease in token prices due to the excess of NFTs.
Kim says the token market is impacted when users are incentivized to sell more tokens.
Yawn Rong’s Open Letter
Based on recent hints from the STEPN team, changes are being prepared. It all started on Twitter on October 10 when co-founder Yawn Rong wrote an open letter to the community, explaining that changes are underway so that we can continue to bring value to GMT and the Find Satoshi Lab ecosystem.
He further stated that the team would use everything available to move on to the next stage of FSL.
