Sweatcoin’s journey continues with Sweat Economy! This interview with Oleg Fomenko explores Sweat Economy’s vision: a “Movement Economy” that rewards movement with $SWEAT tokens.
In this interview, Oleg Fomenko, the Co-founder of Sweat Economy, delves into Sweatcoin‘s innovative journey as a pioneer in rewarding movement with digital currency and how Sweat Economy expands on this foundation. By tokenizing physical activity with $SWEAT, the platform aims to create a “Movement Economy,” transforming physical activity into a valuable, liquid asset.
Fomenko discusses the Sweat Economy’s differentiation in the crowded “move-to-earn” space, emphasizing sustainable business models and genuine movement verification. He also explains the strategic integration with the NEAR Protocol blockchain, ensuring scalability and seamless user experience. Join us as Fomenko shares insights into the long-term vision for the Sweat Economy, its potential societal benefits, and the measures taken to ensure data privacy and user engagement.
Excerpts from the interview;
How does Sweat Economy enhance Sweatcoin’s idea of rewarding movement with digital currency?
A more compelling value proposition would be to make your physical activity more valuable, which is the mission of Sweat Economy. $SWEAT is the new asset class, with your physical activity tokenized. Think of it like the value of attention around which humanity has built a 7 trillion dollar economy – Attention Economy.
We all know that physical activity is valuable, and the Sweat Economy is putting a price on it—making it a liquid asset. Now, it can power extremely important value exchanges between you and your insurer, healthcare provider, employer, and government. Physical activity will be worth trillions of dollars, and using blockchain tokenization technology, we will build this Movement Economy much faster than we managed to build an Attention Economy.
Pricing physical activity takes work. That’s why we have engaged leading academic institutions in this field and given them grants to evaluate the economic value of an “active day” (10,000 steps walked) to set a benchmark for long-term movement.
Meanwhile, we continue to innovate with $SWEAT and continuously add more utility. With the help of chain abstraction technology, we are turning $SWEAT into a cross-chain gas token. This means users could pay their gas fees on any blockchain through movement. Soon, all users of Sweat Wallet will have all of their $SWEAT assets visible in one slick interface to use however they want, including covering blockchain gas fees no matter what blockchain is used — if you use Sweat Wallet, you can PAY YOUR FEES WITH YOUR FEET. This is in addition to the existing and well-recognized utility of winning rewards, earning yield in Grow Jars, engaging with several GameFi products, etc.
The “move-to-earn” space has become increasingly crowded. How does the Sweat Economy differentiate itself from other players in this market?
At Sweat Economy, we believe that “move-to-earn” is dead! Long live the #MovementEconomy! Companies in this space must build sustainable business models and create value for early adopters and mass-market users. As the creator of the “Move-2-Earn” space in 2015, Sweat Economy differentiates itself by:
- Knowing how to build huge scale — where else can you find a business with over 100 million users?
- Ability to build a long-term sustainable business and value of $SWEAT without needing to resort to ponzinomics
- One of the most critical parts of building a successful #MovementEconomy business is knowing what movement is genuine and when users are trying to fake it. Over the last ten years, with a more than 164 million user base, we have built a sophisticated movement verification model that ensures that no $SWEAT is issued unless a user sweats over it!
This allowed us to reach several important milestones in terms of token unit economics:
- $SWEAT has been deflationary since last July, so the circulation supply has decreased despite users earning $SWEAT by walking. There are not that many projects in the world of web3 that were able to achieve this milestone. For example, it took Ethereum 6 years to get to this position.
- The Sweat Economy has reached positive token unit economics. This means that we can generate more revenues from our users than the value of $SWEAT emitted for physical activity, and therefore, as our business scales, the token economics are becoming increasingly attractive!
Also Read: Mastering First-Party Data in a Privacy-focused Era
How does integrating Sweat Economy with the $SWEAT token on the NEAR Protocol blockchain benefit users and the platform?
We analyzed fourteen different chains and conducted extensive testing when choosing the protocol to build on. Ultimately, NEAR won hands-down on the most important dimensions.
Firstly, regarding strategy, NEAR is built for the next billion users. This means that it offers speed while being cheap. More importantly, Near offers the best onboarding user experience in any chain. The next billion users will be unable to pay a 10-cent fee per transaction, and the 525 transactions per second limit on most EVM chains won’t be enough. NEAR, on the other hand, lives up to its promises.
Secondly, the NEAR founders and the team they built are an incredible group of builders. They innovate and deliver some of the best products, which is invaluable for building a long-term, viable business.
Thirdly, NEAR offers a major technological advantage. Its sharded architecture delivers the best performance of any chain and allows it to grow as we scale. When we came in, there were two shards; now, there are six. This gives us the confidence to continue scaling without the fear of hitting the choke point.
Add Chain Abstraction (or Chain Signatures, as some would call it) to this mix. You realize that NEAR Protocol is the only chain that realizes that the future of crypto is not in building blockchain silos but in building chain-agnostic architecture that would allow you to manage your assets without worrying about the chain. This will help to bring the next billion people to web3 who are not interested in managing complex user experience, who are not keen to manage countless keys and seed phrases, and who would like to have a complete view of their assets regardless of the chain their assets happen to be on.
What are the long-term goals of Sweat Economy’s “Movement Economy” concept, and how does it benefit people and society?
Everyone agrees that movement has value. However, no one seems to have an answer when you ask how much it’s worth. This is strange since most things that have value also have a price. If we know the price of, for example, our attention down to a decimal, why don’t we know the precise value of our movement?
To create the Movement Economy, we need to understand the value and price of physical activity. Then, we can create a value exchange with all those who benefit from people more—healthcare providers, insurers, employers, and governments. The more valuable physical activity becomes, the more parties participate in this emerging multi-trillion-dollar value exchange.
By tokenizing your physical activity and returning the value of your effort to you, we are making the world more physically active, which, most importantly, creates a lot of value for humanity. And if the value of Attention Economy is measured in trillions of dollars, how can the value of physical activity be any lower? After all, being physically active makes us more productive and happier, reduces absenteeism, reduces our need for healthcare, and ultimately extends our health span! We have to make it fair, too, so centralized tech companies don’t capture that value but rather is returned to the users. Returning value to those who create it will generate more wealth for users and society since a more active society is more productive, with its members living longer and contributing more to their community and economy.
How does Sweat Economy safeguard user data while maintaining an engaging experience?
We have never sold, do not sell, and never will sell your data. This would betray trust and has nothing to do with our goal—to make the world more physically active. The only way the data is used is to verify that your physical activity is genuine and that everyone trusts that when $SWEAT is issued, it is not gamed by putting one’s phone on a treadmill or by your dog running around a park. The details of your movement are never put on the chain for others to see and are only used in our verification algorithm to issue $SWEAT to you, the person who sweated for it.
As we grow and develop, we promise that through all our services and partnerships, detailed and personally identifiable data will remain private and only be used to turn more of your sweat into $SWEAT.
What are some of the biggest challenges and opportunities for the “move-to-earn” industry?
The biggest challenge is realizing we are not building a flash-in-the-pan fad product but a whole new economy worth trillions of dollars. We are creating a whole new asset class—tokenized physical activity—that will power the value exchange between you and third parties benefiting from your activity—healthcare providers, insurers, employers, and governments.
Also Read: Integrating CDPs with Your Marketing Stack: Challenges and Best Practices
The other challenge is to shed the image created by some early projects that, unlike Sweat Economy, did not create a sustainable business model. This is why we believe that “move-to-earn” is dead but that #MovementEconomy is only starting to emerge.
Beyond earning rewards, how does Sweat Economy motivate users to stay active and engaged in the long term?
The main engagement mechanism is your ability to tokenize your physical activity. However, we have several engagement mechanics that cater to the needs of our users, who understand that the value of their physical activity could be more affordable. Staking is one; the ability to win rewards linked to your physical activity is another, and so is the ability to engage with GameFi, learn about new and up-and-coming projects, etc. Here is a bit of alpha – look out for a new product we will call “Active Income.”
