Play-to-earn tokens like $AXS, $MANA and $SAND made waves across the universe in 2021 but it seems 2022 is for tokens of another GameFi brand called Move-to-Earn.
M2E games are the latest trend in the blockchain gaming industry. Move-to-Earn, similar to play-to-earn, is a model where users are rewarded in cryptocurrency for their step count. It basically allows gamers to earn cryptocurrencies or tokens when they exercise.
Some of the biggest known platforms for this model are StepN, Genopets, Digital Fitness, Step, Calo and some others. All these platforms have governance tokens that users get as rewards. The beautiful side to this is that they have been bringing in substantial returns for early investors, especially in April 2022.
Virtually all Move-to-earn tokens are on a rally at the moment. According to data from Coingecko at press time, the M2E market cap is at $2.29 Billion, a 8.6% increase in the last twenty-four hours. $GMT, the governance token of the biggest M2E platform – StepN is up 58.3% in the last seven days. Genopets’ $Gene in the last one week, has a 36.1% increase. $CALO is up 58.6% in the last seven days. Digital Fitness’ $DEFIT, 88.6% and $STEP a whopping 210.9% all in the last one week.
$GMT is also the #1 trending token on Coinmarketcap at the moment. Move-to-earn token investors are definitely having a good time in a general bear market.
Why is it gaining traction?
The reason why move-to-earn tokens are gaining momentum in the market is largely due to the growing interest in the sector. The M2E sector has seen a sharp increase in market cap in recent times, $GMT price has jumped over 3500% since March 11 according to Coingecko.
The Solana-based move-to-earn platform – StepN earned $26 million in Q1 2022.
“As of mid-March, we had 100,000 daily active users, and that number has doubled since,” Chief Business Officer – Shiti Manghani told CoinDesk in an interview earlier this month.
Not everybody enjoys exercising, so creating an incentive to push people into embracing healthy lifestyle habits is a novel initiative that has still not experienced its real boom in my opinion.
To put this in perspective, a Vietnamese, named Tuan Anh who is an office worker, says he does not have much time to exercise due to the nature of his job. He wanted to improve his health after Covid but still made excuses for not exercising until he saw some friends jogging to earn money.
“It sounds crazy but I’ve been getting paid for running for two weeks now. I spent over $1,000 to buy a pair of NFT shoes on StepN, and so I’m going to have to run no matter what to make my investment worthwhile”.
M2E combines elements of GameFi, SocialFi and NFT. Some of the factors causing the unprecedented growth rate of its tokens are that the concept fulfills some real needs of the community. Needs like fitness training while also offering a simple money-making process.
Many participants, observers and analysts expect the burgeoning sectors’ tokens like $GMT, $GENE, $MOOV, $DEFIT and others to achieve later in 2022 a meteoric rise similar to Axie Infinity’s $AXS last year.
