🍬 Stepping Down 👟

GM and welcome to SOL Sweet. Let's catch up on Solana over coffee:

• StepN dumps China

• Solana's late (then crashes)

• Extra sweets

• Funny tweet of the week

In a sweet 3 minutes and 8 seconds 🍬

StepN dumps China

The hit move-to-earn app, StepN, broke up with China just before we hit publish last week. 

We didn’t mention it because we like to wait and see how things shake out.

Well, damn, shake out they did.

China turned out to be like that crazy ex-girlfriend, and StepN is down big time after calling things off.

Wait, back the truck up - what’s a StepN?

StepN is the worlds first move-to-earn success. If you follow web3 even a little bit, you've probably heard about it in the past two months. It's a fitness app that works like this:

1. buy a sneaker (they're NFTs)

2. get outside and walk/jog/run in real life

3. earn tokens which can be converted into dollars

That's very high level. If you want to learn more go here or here. Now back to the story.

StepN started to grow quickly as people caught on to the idea of being paid to exercise.

The last reported stats from the team were 3 million monthly active users and 800k daily active users.

Now those numbers might seem low compared to web2 app Strava. They boasted 95 million users at the end of 2021, reportedly adding 2 million new users each month!

But in web3 terms, they're huge. OpenSea has 1.5 million active users. StepN doubled them in terms of users in just a few months. That's crazy.

Those users helped fuel some impressive numbers on the run up:

• A single NFT sneaker cost >$1000 at one point

• GST, the in game token, reached an all time high of $9 per token

• Users were regularly showing daily earnings of $100-200 on Twitter (that was on the low end!)

But there were always concerns about the sustainability of the project. Some even called it a ponzi.

What would happen when user growth slowed down? How would users continue to earn without new money coming in?

The short answer - you saw the charts above, right?

GPS support for the app won't be turned off in mainland China until July 15th, but users appeared to react quickly by dumping their shoes and tokens.

As a result, those $1000 shoes are now going for ~$200. GST is worth 97c. And those daily earnings are more like $10-20.

Like the old saying goes, nothing lasts forever.

It was inevitable that StepN would slow down. Skeptics will say I told you so.

But there's still reasons to be optimistic. The team doesn't look like they're going anywhere. There's talk of more brand partnerships. Plus web3 adoption continues to rise.

And if Strava is anything to go by, StepN hasn't even scratched the surface of their total addressable market yet!

Solana's late (then crashes)

Over the weekend, it was reported the Solana blockchain was running 30 minutes late.

This doesn't affect use of the network, but it does mean time records on the blockchain aren't accurate to current wall clock times.

Block times, which are meant to run for 400 milliseconds, are actually averaging 650-750 milliseconds.

That might not seem like a big deal, but it adds up over a year.

Despite the Solana team stating it doesn't impact performance, there are concerns staking rewards will be impacted.

Longer block times = fewer epoch's.

Fewer epoch's = less yield from staking.

In a bear market, impacts to yield could drive the SOL price down even further.

And as if that wasn't enough to be concerned about, Solana crashed again on Wednesday.

While the crash was due to a bug and not related to the time issue, the actual timing of the crash couldn't have been worse.

@player2moo did a great job of explaining the crash in simple terms:

It's definitely tough times for Solana believers. But we maintain faith in the team and the long-term viability.

After all, this is crypto!

Extra sweets

This NFT project flipped the script by scamming a scammer. Wild stuff.

Apparently, Solana's NFT market has 6 sellers for every buyer. Crowded.

Blockchain API company Alchemy expands into Solana. They helped develop another company you might've heard of - OpenSea.

One of the biggest centralized trading and lending platforms, Genesis, is tipping $75M into Maple's Solana lending platform. 

Funny tweet of the week

I need to know who runs Magic Eden's twitter, they dropped this 👑

Okay, another interesting week. How are you feeling about Solana? Hit reply and let us know.

And please take 10 seconds to forward this to a friend who should be keeping up with Solana. It's as easy as one, two, three, and it helps us massively. Thanks!

- Toby (@TenderKiwi)