Observations of different earning strategies in Stepn
At the moment in Stepn, there is very little gameplay involved, aside from trying to maximise the earning potential of your shoes. Naturally, this has also lead to people trying to extract as much as they can from the ecosystem. This isn’t a post about whether or not Stepn is sustainable, but in the long term, P2E games need to be resilient to people trying to game the system. What was interesting to see, were the different levels of arbitrage people used to extract as much value as possible.
Level 1 — Minting and selling on in-app marketplace
Breeding and selling 2/7 mint shoes was the most obvious way to earn a quick profit. So much so, that the entire GST price was once entirely propped up by Chinese minting farms.
This came to an abrupt end on May 27th when the Stepn team announced they were ceasing services in China to comply with regulation.
Level 2 — Selling on Magic Eden
The most common advice you’ll receive before starting Stepn is to always purchase directly off the in-app marketplace. For some reason, the floor price on Magic Eden has always been a Sol or so higher, and often selling above floor. During this bear period, at the time of writing, the floor on the app is ~2 Sol whereas on Magic Eden it’s 2.4. Still a bit of value to be had, which isn’t too bad. As a seller, you just have to account for the 5 GST fee transferring from in-game wallet to external to end up slightly ahead.
Level 3 — Famous Fox Raffles
Raffling your NFT via Famous Fox’s raffle platform for $DUST was by far the most lucrative method during the mania but with slightly higher risk.
For example on May 29th, the floor price Magic Eden was ~10.86 Sol.
However, if you had raffled your shoe for $DUST such as this example, you would have net 20ish (2.7*1.5*222/44) Sol as $DUST and Sol prices were ~$2.7 and ~$44 respectively.
The risk was that your raffle would get limited ticket or no buyers. Some people resorted to buying their own tickets to mitigate risk. Since then, these accounts have been flagged.
As you can see, there are even different strategies when it comes to selling, which is a small portion of the game.