#69 Building A Billion Dollar Solana App: With STEPN CEO, Shiti Manghani

Disruptors and curious minds! Welcome to Thinking On Paper: real conversations on the impact of emerging technologies on business and culture. This week we’re speaking with Stepn CEO Shiti Manghani. Solana is has over taken Ethereum in terms of defi transactions... it has perhaps the most engaged audience in cryptocurrency, all the memecoins and more problems on decentralization than a blockchain should wish to have... so why the success? 👟 STEPN is a web3 lifestyle and fitness app built on the Solana blockchain . It launched on December 1st 2021 with 99,999 NFT trainers. Each cost 1.3 SOL (Sol was trading at $228 dollars that day). In March 2022, they launched their governance token, GMT. The following month GMT was worth $4 and Stepn had a $3 billion market cap. If I’m reading the charts correctly, at one point 24-hour trading surpassed $4 billion. Someone sold a Stepn NFT for 58 Sol. Pretty darn extraordinary. Move-to-earn was a thing. You probably remember it. Of course there were many imitators to the Stepn throne. You could sleep, eat, meditate and (insert verb here)… to earn. The Stepn concept - if not the tech - was simple: you won GST (Green Satoshi Tokens, not GMT) based on how far you ran, jumped, hopped, swam, crawled. I'll be honest, I stopped paying attention at that point. But here’s the thing. Where most died, Stepn survived. Yes, It took a hit. The floor price is 0.01 Sol. GMT is trading at $0.2. But the market cap is still half a billion. A community has stuck with them. Or a new one joined. Stepn has matured. It's a lifestyle app. A social platform. Where people want to get healthy (and wealthy?) Strava meets couch-to-5k meets friend Tech. Last week it announced a partnership with Adidas. We're curious to know more. ===================== TIMESESTAMPS (0:00) Disruptors And Curious Minds (0:48) Web3 Remembers Stepn 2:04 Our Sponsors Wripple 2:34 Welcome Shiti Manghani 3:26 What Excites Shiti About Her Role In Stepn 7:01 The Stepn Story 10:10 What Is Stepn? 10:30 Stepn For Beginners 12:52 Explain The Stepn NFTS 15:13 How Did Stepn Survive The Bear Market? 18:55 The Adidas Collaboration 22:13 Real Life Stepn Fitness Success Stories 25:00 How Much Can You Earn In Stepn? 29:20 Community Building 31:45 Apple Pay 34:40 The Future Of Stepn 36:53 Rewards And Micro Payments 40:10 How To Create A Global Time With Solana 43:44 How To Onboard The Next Generation 45:19 Book Club ================================

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#web3 #blockchain #solana #movetoearn #lifestyle