STEPN turns 1, It’s A Movement

7 min readSep 1, 2022

Happy STEPNEMBER!

We can hardly believe it, but we’re turning one this month. And we’re so excited to announce that in honour of this anniversary, we’re launching a brand new campaign to define this era.

“It’s A Movement” encompasses STEPN’s deep commitment to five key pillars that define STEPN for what it is — a revolutionary movement!

“It’s a movement” captures the spirit of :

Health and Wellness: To be wholeheartedly devoted to our users’ health — physically, mentally, and socially.
Social Connectedness: To build digital campfires — connect our users to each other and empower them to move together in the community.
Environmental Responsibility: To harness the power of technology and organic movement to achieve carbon neutrality and help the environment.
Financial Freedom: To reimagine decentralised platforms enabling a self-sustaining infrastructure for STEPN users
Bridging Web2 and Web3: To educate and onboard the next 100 million users onto web3.

STEPN — It’s A Movement

Physical Movement: To Health and Wellness

We’re creating a rallying call, motivating people to find reward in healthy activity.

At STEPN, our core mission is to encourage you to get up and move outdoors, whether that’s moving towards a healthier you or moving to feel good.

Why do you walk, jog, or run? Do you want to disconnect from your screen? Fantastic. Do you want to reconnect with yourself, or with other people? Great. No matter what your incentive is, we’re here to support you in your journey towards a healthier lifestyle.

And we’re going above and beyond, innovating to reimagine fitness tech from the bottom up.

As we’ve written about before, there’s a paradox in the fitness industry. Even as health and wellness companies notch record-breaking revenues and growth, adults across the world remain chronically inactive, contributing to a staggering $117 billion in annual healthcare costs.

The problem is that everyone knows that exercise is good for you, and everyone wants to exercise more… but actually implementing and maintaining a consistent workout habit is easier said than done. In the age of screens and instant gratification, it’s harder than ever to overcome the inertia of getting outside.

It’s a tough problem, and that’s why we’ve combined four powerful forces to solve the biggest challenge in fitness — how to get people moving consistently and make the world a healthier place.

Social Movement: Stronger Together

Community is the bedrock of STEPN and it goes hand in hand with health and well-being. Our very founding story is built on creating new connections.

In the wake of the COVID pandemic, populations across the world were in lockdown and socially isolated. Gyms were closed, travel came to a halt, and many folks struggled to maintain connections with their friends and family.

We saw this happen, that loneliness was rampant in communities all across the world, and a core reason why we constructed STEPN was to get people outdoors, walking and connecting with their loved ones and friends.

We’re empowering a community of runners, gamers, and innovators.

According to Gallup’s 2022 Global Emotions report, a staggering 330 million adults go for weeks without talking to a single friend or family member. And loneliness has major health risks as well — social isolation and less interactions lead to physiological changes, even leading to increased risk for all-cause mortality.

We believe that community is the panacea to loneliness. And we’re here to build a digital campfire for web3 exercises across the world.

Financial Movement: Freedom

We’re building new realms and reimagining decentralised platforms, bringing the benefits of financial freedom to more people.

Our financial infrastructure and token economy is the engine that keeps STEPN running. With millions of users, we oversee a massive amount of trading volume and throughout this journey, we’ve been constantly gathering feedback and implementing new changes.

At the core of our business model, this means constructing an economy that rewards users for movement and valorises healthy habits — helping users uncover financial freedom in movement.

But it also involves a whole spread of other projects to reinforce the robustness of our economy. That includes things like rolling out our GMT earning plans or launching Realms to translate intangible value from our partners and collaborations into tangible value for our players.

Plus, as we’ve announced, we’ve introduced new revenue streams to create value for our community members — launching our very own decentralised exchange, DOOAR, to channel additional money into STEPN’s ecosystem.

And if you’ve stuck around enough you know that at STEPN, we put our 100% into every new endeavour no matter what we’re doing — DOOAR was no different.

Environmental Movement: Caring for the Climate

With every step, we’re committed to creating a more sustainable future, together. We firmly believe that leveraging technology and digital tools can generate real-world benefits, from healthier lifestyles to reversing climate change.

Why are we so dedicated to combating climate change? Beyond caring for the future of our world and our children, environmental stewardship is woven into STEPN’s DNA as a part of our mission. We are in the business of making people healthier, and the health of our earth and of the humans that live on that earth are inextricably interconnected. In other words, improvements in one are linked to, and empower, improvements in the other.

That’s why we embrace climate responsibility as an integral part of our business model. And in honour of that, we’ve taken bold steps toward carbon neutrality — donating 100K USD every month on Nori, to reverse climate change and pioneer a climate-positive web3 space.

Not only are we dedicated to offsetting our impact on climate change, we also want to set an example and lead the way for web3 projects to do their part. Penning thought leadership pieces, we’ve also helped shed light on projects that are aligned with our mission, designing cities that are healthier and more walkable for humans.

Ultimately, making the world a healthier place isn’t limited to exercise. We want to make the whole ecosystem of the world healthier — and that includes caring for the health of our planet.

Web3 Movement: Bridging the Gap

Finally, we’re on a quest to onboard the next generation of users onto web3.

This has been a fundamental part of our mission since the very beginning. We believe that web3 will revolutionise the internet as we know it, and we want to act as a bridge, bringing on a diverse population of users from web2 to web3.

Championing inclusion, we have attracted a unique audience to the web3 world — not just people who are crypto natives, but everyone from moms to dads, gamers to runners, and more.

By marrying real-world activity to web3 gameplay, we’ve added a whole new layer of utility to NFTs, broadening appeal and access through vibrant communities and digital rewards.

STEPNEMBER Challenges

To celebrate our first #STEPNversary and the incredible things we have achieved together this year, we are launching weekly challenges for our community with a prize pool of 100,000 GMT distributed between winners.

Challenge 1 — STEPN Before/After

(2nd to 8th September)

From how it started to the finish line, how did STEPN sneakers impact you this year? Share your progress using the STEPN App with a Before and After pic and we’ll share our favourite ones with the community.

Challenge 2 — 12,000 Steps

(9th to 15th September)

Walk 12,000 steps and connect with nature. Did you know if you move 12,000 steps in a day you can avoid creating nearly 10 lbs of C02 in vehicle emissions? Show us how you took on our 12,000 Steps Challenge.

Challenge 3 — Burger Burn

(16th to 22nd September)

How many steps can you run up in one go? You can burn 19 calories per minute by running up the stairs, that’s an average cheeseburger every 13 minutes. Show us how many burgers you burn a day in our STEPN stairs challenge.

Challenge 4 — Best Running Friends Forever

(23rd to 29th September)

People who have running buddies are more likely to commit to a healthy routine. Plus who doesn’t like spending time with their favourite humans? Share your crew’s longest run, walk or jog in the final STEPN challenge.

How to Participate

1. Post a Picture or Video on Twitter or Instagram in line with the theme (Please note: Instagram stories are not counted)

2️. Follow the STEPN Twitter and Instagram pages

3️. Include the relevant hashtags in your post #STEPNEMBER, #STEPN and the challenge hashtag (#STEPNbeforeafter #STEPN12000 #STEPNburgerburn or #STEPNBRFF)

These challenges will be announced on the dates as per above schedule on our socials — Follow our Twitter and socials for regular updates

Rewards

The top 20 entries from each challenge will be selected to win 1,000 GMT tokens each. There will be an additional grand prize of 20,000 GMT, whoever wins all of the challenges will share this grand prize together. Thus a total prize pool of 100,000 GMT

Top entries will be scored by STEPN Ambassadors based on the following criteria Video Quality Clear, (Well-taken, Well lit) Video Content (Fun, Engaging, Relevant to the theme) and Engagement Rate (Retweets, Shares, Likes) Higher the engagement rate, the higher the chance of winning. Winners from challenges will be announced weekly via the STEPN Official Twitter account.

Closing Thoughts

The best part — This is just the beginning.

These movements interweave and interact with each other, enhancing each other and empowering each other. Physical health and social health go hand in hand, as well as with the health of our planet. Meanwhile, the financial infrastructure of STEPN powers those three core areas, while acting as the driver of onboarding new and diverse users into the web3 movement.

Join us as we usher in a new age of our movement with fellow STEPNers. We can’t wait to STEPN into this next stage of this movement with you all!

Team STEPN