Time for an update!

I've been playing STEPN now for about six months.

The biggest benefit hasn't been monetary, it's actually been physical. I have a bad habit of being a workaholic, and STEPN has been great at making sure I take a break and go for a one hour walk each day.

I've always known long walks are good for me, most of my good ideas come to me during long walks alone, I just struggle to fit them into my day.

Just the thought of getting a new mystery box and some crypto if I take a walk has been enough to get me out of my seat and outside! I've also been living beachside for the past couple of months, so it's been doubly good. I get a long walk in the sunshine, along the beach, and I earn some crypto!

However, I have no idea if I'm actually making any money from it. Whenever I'm bored I open the app and upgrade some gems, spend my coins on some new sneakers and now I've no idea whether I'm in profit or not.

That's what this post will try to figure out - how much have I spent on sneaker NFTs, and are they going to be profitable in the end!?

My Current Strategy

If you surf the interwebs, you'll find a ton of STEPN nerds who have built fancy tools on how to make the most money.

Unfortunately I don't have time to spend hours strategising over my virtual sneakers, but one tool I have used quite a lot is STEPN.guide which helps you figure out how to best spend your attribute points.

From what I've managed to understand, there are three main "tactics":

- Maximise Efficiency (GST earning)

- Maximise Luck (get gems from mystery boxes)

- Maximise Comfort (GMT earning)

Now, there's a few catches.

You can't just maximise Luck, because you need GST (and quite a lot of it) to actually open your mystery boxes.

The cool thing about Mystery boxes is, you get gems, and gems are worth a lot!

For example, these Mystery boxes I've listed above are L5 boxes. They will usually give you one L2 gem, and three L1 gems.

A Comfort L2 gem is worth around 30 GMT.

Compare that to walking with a Comfort sneaker to earn straight GMT, I usually earn about 9 GMT per day.

Compare that to walking with a Efficiency sneaker, you might earn ~120 GST in a day, which is worth about 8 GMT, but you can also need that GST to open your mystery boxes and upgrade your gems. So GST is very useful too.

As you can see there's a trade-off between tactics, and the results also change daily as prices on the market change. Of course, that's what makes games like this fun!

What I've been doing personally is I invested in two Uncommon sneakers, one for Luck and one for Comfort:

On the Luck shoe, I normally get a Level 5 Mystery Box and around 70 GST each day.

On the Comfort shoe, I normally get around 8-9 GMT each day.

This is using 11 Energy.

HOW MUCH I HAVE I SPENT?

Since there are four possible currencies at play here (GST, GMT, SOL and USD) it's actually quite a messy exercise.

To keep it easy, I'm just going to deal in SOL:

How much SOL have I put in, versus how much SOL will I get out?

The first part of that equation is easy: I've put 41.46 SOL into STEPN.

When I purchased that SOL, it was worth around $80, at its peak it was worth around $10,000, and as I write this it's worth about $600 - you can see why it's impossible to do this exercise in USD!

Also, valuing the assets I have in STEPN is also hard to do accurately, but we'll try.

My STEPN Assets:

TOTAL ASSETS:
1,324 GMT (24.92 SOL)

WALLET BALANCE:
160.4 GMT (3.02 SOL)
388.4 GST (0.36 SOL)
0.33 SOL

TOTAL VALUE: 28.63 SOL
(AT 9/1/23)

Meaning I'm down around 13 SOL since I started.

This is not a surprise, as the price of sneakers has fallen a lot since I started. 

Will the price recover? No idea!

However, I do think my assets are worth a bit more than stated, as I've used the floor price for sneakers, and I'm quite sure my sneakers would sell today for significantly higher than the floor price (probably about double).

In any case, currently I'm able to earn around 10 GMT per day (guesstimate).

At current prices, 13 SOL is around 690 GMT, so in 69 days I should be breakeven.

That's IF I don't go and buy a bunch of new sneakers 😀

And of course, if the market decides to pump and the price of sneakers all quadruple, I'll move into profit very quickly.