‘Move-to-Earn’ Game Stepn Renews Token Burn Amid Ethereum Expansion

Stepn, a Web3 fitness game billed as a “move-to-earn” experience, is making some major moves of its own. The startup announced today it will use a portion of its Q2 profits to buy back and burn tokens, plus the firm recently revealed an expansion to the Ethereum blockchain.

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According to the company, it earned $122.5 million in second-quarter profits from platform fees. Now it plans to use 5% of that ($6.125 million) to buy Stepn’s GMT governance tokens from the secondary market and then burn them.

At the current price of $0.87 per token, that would amount to just over 7 million GMT tokens permanently removed from a max supply of 6 billion (600 million of which have been circulated). Crypto firms—including exchanges like Binance and PancakeSwap—sometimes initiate such buybacks to reduce supply and drive up token values.

“The buyback and burn accrue value back to GMT—our unifying thread across all the initiatives that we undertake at Stepn,” Chief Marketing Officer Shiti Manghani told Decrypt today, “be that the sustainability of our game economy, the launch of our [decentralized exchange], DOOAR, or new launches on the horizon.”

This isn’t the first time that Stepn has used profits to buy back and burn tokens. In April, the firm announced that it would spend approximately $26 million to do just that, and its official website shows that it’s burned more than 216 million GMT tokens to date. Stepn has plans for additional quarterly token buybacks and burns.

Stepn is a mobile app that rewards users with cryptocurrency for running and walking in the real world. It’s an experience that Manghani recently described on Decrypt’s gm podcast as being like “Strava meets Pokémon Go.”

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