Solana-based move-to-earn game STEPN is reportedly planning to lay off about 100 staff owning to the cryptocurrency bear market and its user base declining from recent highs.
According to cryptocurrency writer Colin Wu, moderators and ambassadors will be among the fired employees, and investment in STEPN will be reduced.
Wu said, citing sources in the community, that there will also be a move toward supporting Find Satoshi Lab (FSL), the parent business of STEPN, and its new initiatives.
About STEPN
Find Satoshi Lab, an Australian fintech company, launched STEPN, which went live in 2021 and allows users to buy nonfungible token (NFT) sneakers to walk or run outside to earn Green Satoshi Tokens (GST), which can be spent for in-game purchases or cashed out.
Following its introduction, STEPN had a promising start; according to data from CoinGecko, GST peaked at $8.51 and GMT, its governance token, reached an all-time high in April, reaching $4.11.
Now, GST has decreased by over 99% to $0.026 and GMT has plunged by over 85% to trade at $0.61 at the time of writing.
According to data from Dune Analytics, the app’s daily active user count reached a record high of 105,257 on June 26 before plummeting to fewer than 6,000 users in September and then marginally increasing to 11,877 users as of October 5.
The forced blocking of users from mainland China and a June distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack are recent defeats.
According to cryptographer Lucia Kim from the self-described Web3-native accelerator nonce Classic, STEPN’s restrictions may be to blame for the fall.
Kim explained the system was designed to force users to sell their tokens on the market in order to receive rewards, but this saw a rise in supply, which led to an “accelerating token price decrease due to excessive supply of NFTs” in a lengthy post on Twitter on October 4.
According to Kim, the more rewards users receive, the more tokens they sell to the market, which has an impact on the ecosystem.
The STEPN team recently hinted at upcoming changes in an open letter to their community sent on Twitter on October 10 by co-founder Yawn Rong, who said, “Changes are underway so that we can continue to bring value to GMT and the Find Satoshi Lab ecosystem.”
“We will be devoting all of our resources to progressing to the next stage of FSL,” said Rong.
Rong told his 34,000 Twitter followers that they “won’t want to miss what happens next” despite the lack of details that were provided. He claims that more information would be provided over the coming weeks.
