STEPN Earning Strategies, #1: The Walker

Strategy overview

I call this strategy “The Walker” because, as you may have guessed, it takes advantage of STEPN’s Move2Earn feature to maximize earnings. It’s based on the game mechanics, rather on NFT or token trading.

Here’s what “The Walker” is all about:

• Profile: Conservative

• Risk: Medium-low

• Complexity: Easy

• Intensity: Low

• Initial investment: 14 SOL, or approx. $1.3K

• Approx. ROI: 40 days

• Time required: About 15 minutes a day

Getting started with “The Walker”

This strategy is straightforward and pretty easy to follow. First of all, you need to create your wallet on the STEPN app and send some SOL to it.

At the time of writing this article, SOL is worth $87.88 and floor prices for sneaker NFTs are around 13.3 SOL. Let’s round that up to $90 and 14 respectively.

As a result, your initial investment would be around $1,260. Again, let’s bring that up to $1,300; just in case.

Finding a sneaker

Once your SOL has arrived in your in-app spending wallet, you’ll need to go find yourself a sneaker.

How to know which sneaker NFT to pick up? Here’s some quick aspects to consider.

Sneaker type

The name says it all. Even if they have the lowest rewards-to-energy rate, walkers are the easiest sneakers to use. Their low speed requirement will allow you to use it everyday, as it only requires 10–15 minute walks a day to max them out when you’re starting.





With a walker, you can earn while taking a stroll, walking your dog, going to work — if you go on foot, of course — , or whatever else you’re doing in your everyday life.

Sneaker attributes

For this strategy, you’ll have to focus on two attributes more than the others: efficiency and resilience.

Efficiency directly impacts your earning rate, which means that a higher value on this attribute will yield higher rewards for moving. Resilience, on the other hand, determines how fast a sneaker wears out. As a result, this stat affects your earnings indirectly — the slower your sneaker decays, the less you have to spend repairing it.





That said, you should try to find NFTs that have at least 5 or more base points in these two attributes, or a total of 10 adding the two — 7 efficiency, 3 resilience, for example.


Mints

Sneakers that have already been used to mint more than 2 NFTs tend to be less valuable than those with less mints. However, this strategy doesn’t involve minting new sneakers, so you could use this to your advantage.

If you see a sneaker NFT with the right attributes, but its price is lower because it has 3+ mints, it may be a good idea to buy it anyway. You’d be getting a great sneaker for the Walker strategy at a discount with no downside, since you won’t be using the minting function.


Level, gems, and quality

These attributes are irrelevant for this strategy, since it uses a conservative approach. Try to find level 5, common sneakers with no gems/irrelevant gem sockets (comfort, luck) to make sure you’re not paying extra for stats you won’t use.

Were you paying attention? Take a look at the picture below.

These are two real sneakers of virtually the same price, taken from the marketplace. One of them is good for this strategy. The other one, not so much. If you look at the stats marked in red, you’ll be able to tell them apart. Which one would you choose?




Yes, you guessed it. It’s the one on the left.


Walking, earning, and spending

Once you have your sneaker, you’ll see your energy cap raised to 2. Each energy point equals about 5 minutes of walking, so this won’t take more than 15 minutes a day (10 minute walks + 5 minutes approximately for preparing/setting up the app).


Enhancing your sneaker

If you bought a level 5 sneaker with no added attributes, you’ll have 20 points to spend on improving your NFT.

As I mentioned before, the most relevant stats for the Walker strategy are efficiency ad resilience, so that’s what you should be spending your points. My recommendation is to improve them on a 3:1 ratio (for every 3 points you add to efficiency, add 1 point to resilience).

However, this will depend on the base attributes of the sneaker you purchased. 2:1 and 4:1 ratios are also acceptable, always prioritizing efficiency over resilience.


Leveling up

At first, the GST you earn for walking 10 minutes will barely be enough to repair and level up your sneaker. Be patient.

After your daily walk, leave your NFT leveling up at night (first levels take a few hours). The next day, you’ll see that you can add another 4 points to your attributes.

Keep enhancing your stats using the same ratio until you reach sneaker level 9. By that time, your sneaker should have 30+ efficiency and 10+ resilience. This type of attributes for a walker will yield you about 4 GST for each energy, or 0.8 GST for each 0.2 energy.

At $6 per GST, that’s $48 for walking 10 minutes a day. That earning rate means you’ll recover your initial investment of $1,300 in the next 27 days. Pretty good, huh?

Here’s a pretty close picture of what your sneaker should look like at level 9. In this case, the sneaker had bad base attributes, which is why it didn’t reach 30 efficiency. It still came pretty close, though!





Walker strategy variants

Beyond this point, it’s up to you. You can choose to simply keep walking until you recover your investment; or, if you’re enjoying the game, you can keep leveling up your sneaker. Bear in mind that reaching level 10 requires not only GST, but also GMT, which you’ll have to buy in the exchange.

Another variant of this strategy is to sell your improved sneakers in the marketplace. Indeed, your leveled up sneaker will sell for a bit more than what you paid for it at level 5. You can sell your enhanced NFT at a profit and buy another level 5 walker, starting the process all over again.






Risks and closing thoughts

Although this strategy is very conservative, it still involves considerable risk. The main factors you’ll have to look out for are:

• GST volatility: This will affect your daily earnings, as STEPN pays rewards in GST. However, if GST drops, you can take advantage of that moment to spend it repairing sneakers or leveling up.

• NFT price volatility: NFTs can also experience big swings in price, and the sneaker you bought for 13 SOL may be worth 12.5 the next day. NFT prices usually follow GST prices, so keep an eye on both.

• SOL volatility: NFTs are priced in SOL, so stay alert. If you buy a sneaker for 13 SOL at $90 ($1,170), and sell it for 14 SOL at $80 ($1,120), you’ll be selling at a loss. Even if it seems you’re earning 1 SOL, you’re actually losing $50.

That’s it! I hope you find this useful and can take advantage of “The Walker” to maximize your STEPN earnings — and have some fun and exercise while doing so!

I’ll be sharing more STEPN strategies in the near future, so make sure to follow me on Medium if you don’t want to miss them.

Thanks for reading!