The world of NFTs and cryptocurrency has generated all kinds of new applications. Gamification, nowadays, involves the connection of traditional gaming materials and non-gaming activities, creating a new trend: Move-to-earn.

As people become more digital and video games become more popular, we’ve seen the boom of the Play-to-earn trend shaping financial reward behavior. Therefore, it cannot be disputed that the same approach could apply to traditional unentertaining activities such as exercising. What if your every move couple be converted into valuable digital assets and financial incentives instead of vouchers and discounts?

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What is M2E – Move to Earn?

Making money and improving health, two seemingly incompatible goals on the GameFi market, can suddenly converge into the Move to Earn trend that is extremely hot recently. M2E may be a new term, but it has never been a new concept. Exercise has been gamified for years. Nintendo’s Pokémon Go made a big splash in 2016 that earned $4B in 2022 (Statista). Zombie, Run!, perhaps a more concrete movement-based game, also allows players to unlock audio content such as music and stories as they run. What is remarkable is that ⅙ players are willing to pay ($25 per year) for incentivizes them to work out. If we go further back, we also had the Wii console, pushing forward games like Wii Sports.

Sports generally could be considered a form of M2E since professional athletes make money through sponsorship, winning tournaments, and other means. However, professional sports are probably out of reach for most of us. But M2E can now reward you for being active.

Why is M2E so hot recently?

Being confined is like torture in the context of the entire world gradually becoming accustomed to living with the pandemic. Gamers are no exception to this phenomenon. In lieu of finding their own hand-tied plowing games, Move to Earn is like a tonic to hit the psychology of current users.

Starting off with Genopets, the first M2E project was developed on the Solana Ecosystem. Genopets chooses to approach the majority of users in the market by allowing gamers to customize with the Dual-Earning mechanism. Users can either choose Free to Play (free to play) with a free NFT pet at the beginning of the game or buy NFT eggs and pets in the Marketplace as they like. Genopets is currently in the Beta Test phase, and because the gameplay system is still incomplete, especially in terms of battle mode, it has not really resonated with the community.

The reputation of M2E only surged when Binance Launchpad announced their 28th project, STEPN (GMT), the Move to Earn keyword was really getting more attention. STEPN is stepping up even though the rest of the crypto market experiences its first significant pullback in over two weeks. GMT – the token of this Move-to-earn project has increased 300 times in value (selling price at $0.01 on Binance Launchpad), currently trading around $2.6 – $3.1.

Advantage of Move-to-Earn compared to Play-to-Earn:

The outstanding advantage of M2E compared to P2E is that you will not need to be plugged into your phone 24/7. Rather, you only need to be physically active for a certain period of time to receive a corresponding valuable reward.

The second advantage of M2E is that it forces you to exercise instead of sitting still and clicking on your smartphone. Just think about it: walking in the park, breathing in the fresh air, and receiving the project’s token…What could be better?

And because it can improve the health of players, the Move to Earn movement will certainly not stop at the Crypto market.

M2E Challenger:

User drop issue:

Currently, the market is in a downtrend phase. When a new game comes out, everyone will focus on accumulating and withdrawing profits within a certain period of time. Although the stories of M2E might be different from the P2E scenario, the inflation of tokens is inevitable.

Requirements for participation

The trend has already started and is seeing a bull market for a long period. In the game STEPN, if you did not participate in the airdrop events, initially participating in the game will cost about 10 SOL(~$900) for a pair of NFT shoes. No one wants to be a FOMO latecomer, and they’ll need to consider carefully before participating.

Gameplay

Limitations in terms of gameplay also need to be considered. Quite a few games on the 3crypto market today have such boring gameplay. Instead of emphasizing gameplay, collectibles are put on top to maximize profits from items. Since people exercise for health, not for money, M2E seems to have to put a huge effort into not treading the same waters. In general, the gameplay of these games, not only Move to Earn but also Play to Earn, needs to be improved a lot.

What else apart from STEPN?

Currently, there are quite a few projects working on the Move-to-earn trend, only about 4-5 projects, so the FOMO from investors is inevitable. Here, we will introduce and compare 4 projects that took M2E by storm: Genopets, STEPN, Wirtual and OliveX.

Conclusion

We are currently witnessing only the very beginnings of a very long journey of the Move to Earn trend. Video games are traditionally seen as unhealthy and time-consuming. Promoting exercise, on the other hand, can be used to create a game that attracts health-conscious people as well as other health-related businesses and products.

Undoubtedly, there will be more M2E projects taking place. But they will eventually need to consider whether such scenarios are fair game or how they will address them if they are deemed manipulative. Offering health benefits is uncontroversial, which has a wide appeal. Who knows, Move to Earn could be a huge benefit to people everywhere.