Recently, STEPN, regarded as the leading project of Chinese Web 3, encountered many difficulties.

On May 27th, STEPN announced that it would clear up accounts in mainland China, and stopped providing GPS and IP location services on July 15th. Coupled with the overall retreat of the encryption market, the price of GST and its NFT sneakers continued to fall, especially the newly built but The rapidly growing BNB Chain ecology has been severely trampled, causing a lot of dissatisfaction in the user community.

However, as a user player who holds shoes and token assets, it is obviously useless to write articles and quarrel at this moment. We are more concerned about how the STEPN team, which still has strength and funds, should go next? Is it possible to rebuild market confidence, iterate products, and gradually return the economic model to health?

postpostExplain the four challenges STEPN faces after this chain event:The cross-server energy bridge brings huge profits to new servers; the Mint factory deviates from the original intention of the product movement; the dynamic Mint cost boundary is insufficiently considered; there are more and more shoes and gems, and there is no recycling mechanism.And call on the community to put forward excellent improvement suggestions on the above problems, so as to realize the return of ecological value.

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1. Anti-cheating has long-term significance, but it should not be the top priority at this stage

First of all, I want to talk to you about the anti-cheating system that has been criticized by many community users recently. On June 3, the Move to Earn app STEPN announced that it will add an anti-cheating upgrade to its latest version and launch the M2E anti-cheating system SMAC.

“Cheating annoys other gamers and leads to income conflicts and gaps. In the worst cases, rampant cheating can actually destroy a game’s entire economy. When cheaters quickly earn large amounts of tokens and cash them out instantly, there is an artificial Inflating the token value and then shrinking it, it also distorts STEPN’s sneaker supply and affects the overall lifespan of STEPN.” STEPN officially explained the original intention of introducing anti-cheating upgrades.

Anti-cheating is a long-term task for all games. Previously, some users have exposed themselves to controlling dozens of mobile phones through scripts for running and a large number of Mint sneakers. These cheating accounts do not seem to be prominent during the game’s rising period, and they are even part of the growth data. , but it will become the main selling pressure in the down market. Therefore, this move by the team is understandable.

According to the official introduction, the SMAC anti-cheating system mainly monitors relevant data (GPS tracking, motion sensors, etc.) in STEPN sports through the AI ​​model, and cross-checks with its internal standards; if there is any discrepancy in the data, the user will be marked internally .

After the user's exercise is over, the system will detect the data during the entire exercise process. If it is judged as Human (human), it will issue token rewards, and if it is judged as BOT (robot), the reward will be cancelled, and the energy consumed will not be refunded. In the future, STEPN will also introduce Turing Score (TS), each judgment behavior will affect the user's points, and if the points are less, functions such as transfer and transaction cannot be enabled.

However, the anti-cheating system encountered obstacles on the first day of its launch. Some users said in the community that their real-life running was misjudged as a "BOT" by the system, resulting in the cancellation of rewards.

to respondto respondSaid that after the update was completed, the server suffered more than 25 million DDOS attacks in a short period of time. The huge amount of data made the network congested. AI could not receive the user's data and defaulted to the user as BOT. In addition, the official also launched double energy activities to compensate users. According to community feedback, this problem has indeed been improved in the past two days.

In the long run, the anti-cheating system is to protect the economic system and slow down the selling pressure of GST, but rather than "reducing future wrong issuance", users obviously want to hear "how to accelerate the circulation of existing assets and increase consumption Scenes",secondary title

2. Solve the balance problem after multi-chain deployment, and control the assets and dynamics of each ecology

Multi-chain deployment is the only way for applications, but it is not easy. The native users and ecology of each chain are different.

After opening the new BNB Chain server, in order to help the new chain introduce users, STEPN conducted an airdrop and opened up energy sharing, that is, the energy held by users on Sol-STEPN can be mapped to BNB-STEPN for use. Due to the skyrocketing price of GST on BNB Chain in the early days, and cheap shoes on Sol, many users switched to BSC and chose the configuration of "1 pair of BNB shoes + 8 pairs of Sol shoes" for sports, which greatly shortened the payback period; The BNB Chain shoes are out of value, and the pedals are falling, while the SOL shoes are reduced to "charging treasures".

In response to this problem, some community members proposed to directly cancel energy sharing, that is, the two chains will not interfere with each other. However, Jerry, the founder of STEPN, has previously publicly stated that energy sharing will not be cancelled, but the proportion of shared energy will be changed; in addition, STEPN will continue the realm plan and introduce new blockchains.

(Note: In STEPN, users share the same set of rules in different realms: energy is shared across realms; GMT is bridged across realms; utility tokens in the game will not be bridged across realms. And users can freely define the color theme of realms, utility Visuals and narratives for tokens, NFTs.)

At present, there are two ways to share energy in the future:

One is fixed, such as 1:1. The advantage of this method is that the multi-chains are in an equal position and there is no priority. This is obviously not conducive to new ecology, but if STEPN continues to expand the multi-chain ecology in the future, this is also a good idea. A way to ensure a low threshold cross-chain and avoid the collapse of the overall market due to a single ecological price change.

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3. Adjust the mint mechanism + increase the burning mechanism to control the supply of shoes

The vision of STEPN is for users to gain benefits while exercising, and does not want to become a financial product that separates user experience from fitness. However, in the feedback from some community members, it was found that some accounts held dozens of mobile phones to focus on "Mint to Earn", which violated the original intention of the project.

1) Increase mint threshold

In response to this problem, community members previously proposed to develop a new tool - the Mint scroll. The scrolls are opened from the treasure chests generated after the movement, and holding the scrolls can be Mint; for example, the first-level scroll can be Mint once, and the second-level scroll can be Mint twice... This idea was affirmed by the two founders (Yawn, Jerry), and Got a reply in the AMA, but no further details have been revealed so far.

If one solution is applied, it should be able to effectively reduce the supply of shoes on the market according to the "planned production".

What's more, the reels can cooperate with the anti-cheat system that STEPN has launched. Users must actually exercise in order to qualify for Mint shoes. If the mint shoe rating is also related to this, it should be able to motivate real users more effectively.

2) Regulate mint price

Another problem that STEPN also acknowledges is the insufficient consideration of the edge cases of Mint costs.

At the end of April, STEPN set Mint to float as follows:

This mechanism played a certain role for a short time, but it was obviously not considered enough. The first is that the GST on the BNB Chain once rose to a maximum of $40, and remained above $10 for a period of time, which allowed users to mint shoes and sell them on the market for more than $2,000, and a large number of shoes were produced.

Before the publication of this article, the GST price on Solana was $0.61, and the GST price on BNB Chain was $0.86, both of which are far below the minimum range in the rules, so the Mint price needs to be adjusted. The easiest way is to increase the amount of GST currently required by Mint and increase consumption.

In addition, the official does not always recommend users to hoard shoes. The GST price fluctuates greatly, causing the price of shoes to rise and fall, while the GMT price is relatively small. Another simple solution in the community discussion board is to conduct Mint only based on the GMT price.

3) Increase shoe recycling mechanism

The last one is the key point. Due to the lack of self-adjustment mechanism of shoes and gems, there has been an inflation problem, and an effective and healthy recycling mechanism is needed.

Community members suggested that some traditional game models can be followed, such as "Onmyoji" using the burning mechanism. For example, combine three pairs of ordinary gray shoes Runners together to increase the initial properties of the new shoes; if you burn enough, for example, 10 pairs, you can get a pair of Runners whose initial properties even exceed those of green shoes.

There are also some more attractive but riskier burning methods, for example: burn three pairs of normal shoes and 100 GST at once, with a 30% chance of getting a pair of green shoes and a 5% chance of getting a pair of blue shoes.

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4. Increase the mechanism of repurchase and destruction of GST to boost market confidence in the short term

In addition to the specific economic model adjustments in the product, the highest voice in the community,I still hope that the official team will establish a plan to repurchase and destroy GST, so as to enhance the current market confidence and promote the ecology to re-enter the positive cycle.

At present, the main income of the team comes from 6% of transaction procedures, and the community proposes to take part of the repurchase; or increase the current transaction fee, such as increasing to 10%, and use 4% of it for repurchase and destruction.

datadataIt shows that STEPN has 3 million monthly active users and 800,000 daily active users; its monthly income is 100 million U.S. dollars, and its daily transaction fee net profit is 3-5 million U.S. dollars.At the same time, the data on the chain shows that in the past 10 days, the average number of new users on the STEPN chain exceeded 5,000 per day (less than 4,000 new users were added on June 3 due to system maintenance). That is to say, the actual problems faced by STEPN at present are not as serious as some alarmist KOLs said. The momentum of user growth is still there. The main problem is actually how to correctly guide the public opinion of the community, regain user recognition, and start a positive cycle.

It is undeniable that there are many problems in STEPN's previous public relations strategy, and the attention paid to user feedback is not enough, which has caused suspicion and misunderstanding in the market. Therefore, the most useful "boosting shot" to gain the trust of old players in the short term may be to directly target Intervene in the flow of GST.

However, the STEPN team has made adjustments. Previously, the founder Jerry also posted a post in the community to clarify the misunderstanding and expressed his willingness to listen to the opinions of the community. As mentioned above, STEPN is currently collecting user suggestions to adjust the direction. Interested users can also click the link below to submit your ideas:https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScBQPfI9Mo9mrr708kBZi7s-G7YqxBAzF8HIkFPfGwauY_K7Q/viewform