Marbius at mtnDAO (Danny Nelson/CoinDesk)
Marbius at mtnDAO (Danny Nelson/CoinDesk)
SALT LAKE CITY — It was sometime around dinner as I was drinking a jungle juice that the bad news dawned on me. I texted my boss: “If I don’t walk another 4,400 steps I’ll lose $333.”
Such are the economics lessons you get when you turn your daily steps into fodder for the group building a crypto-based fitness game called Moonwalk.
Moonwalk makes use of an interesting gimmick: People tend to meet their fitness goals (like achieving a particular number of steps per day) when they are subjected to external accountability. This could be societal pressure or a monetary incentive. In Moonwalk’s case, both are true.
During a crisp Wednesday in Utah, a representative from Moonwalk, an 8-month-old startup, persuaded me and three other participants from mtnDAO, a month-long coworking environment in Salt Lake City bustling with coders constructing apps for the Solana blockchain, to effectively gamble on our fitness goals in a step-count regimen. We were a part of the initial external testers of their platform. This setup allows players, after committing to a daily step objective, to combine their assets and hope their counterparts fall short of their goals.
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To take part in our three-day undertaking, we had to invest $1,000 in the USDC stablecoin. Every participant was required to walk 10,000 steps per day; missing the daily quota means yielding $333 to the pool. The accumulated pool will be divided among those who managed to achieve the daily goal by the challenge’s conclusion. As long as we complete 10,000 steps daily, we maintain control over our original deposits and get back our investment.
“It will trick you into getting fit so you don’t lose money,” Marbius, a pseudonymous product manager working on Moonwalk from mtnDAO, explained to a potential player. Another gamer, the pseudonymous Grove St, stated it in these simple terms: “I enjoy making money. I’ve been successful in doing so.”
We transfer our funds to Moonwalk’s collective deposit address, connecting our blockchain accounts with health profiles. These profiles glean step-counting data from both iPhones and Androids. Every 10 minutes, the app fetches step data from Google Fit, refreshing the game’s leaderboard.
I got a feel of being an early-stage tester when I sent my funds to the address and wasn’t immediately displayed on the leaderboard. Marbius reassured me this was a “known bug” that triggers when gamers refresh their web pages while their deposits are still in transit. As they predicted, I appeared on the leaderboard shortly after
I felt driven to start walking instantly because I now had money at stake. Taking advantage of the winter weather, I went for a short walk. Knowing it would become dark in a few hours, I knew I had to get my steps in soon.
Moonwalk’s ambitions stretch beyond step-counting and into many different areas of fitness, founder KW told me. He plans to “make more games incentivizing positive behavior change.”
For now, though, it’s limited to steps. Over the course of three days, I and six other players logged tens of thousands of steps in our rush to avoid losing our stablecoins. Only one player screwed up. Twice he missed his 10,000-step goal, losing $666 to be divided up by the rest of us.
That was just as well for me. When everything was said and done, I walked away with $111 in prize money.
“I think Moonwalk just makes it more fun and engaging to do something simple,” said Anders, the intern at Mrgn Research. “It makes it more competitive, too, which makes it more enjoyable.” He estimated he’d won around $800 in just over a week.
“I definitely plan on continuing to have a game open for a while.”
Meanwhile, I’m behind on today’s steps.
Edited by Nick Baker.
Disclosure
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Danny is CoinDesk’s Managing Editor for Data & Tokens. He owns BTC, ETH and SOL.
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