Adidas is launching a limited edition of its Ultraboost 5 running shoe under joint branding with Stepn Go. The 1,200 pairs come in four styles, with colors assigned at random.
Instead of open sale, however, there will be four raffles, from Dec. 13 to 17, with an advantage going to holders of the previous jointly branded product – the Stepn Genesis, a sneaker NFT released in last April. There will also be a contest on X and two raffles open to members of Alts by Adidas (the company’s “digital identity project” and collection of 20,066 “unique digital avatars”) and to users of the Stepn apps. Raffle winners will be able to claim their shoes from Jan. 6 to 22, after a three-week sale of tickets on Mooar, a marketplace for NFTs.
“The launch of physical shoes is a defining moment in our partnership with Adidas,” says Stepn CEO Shiti Manghani in the press release. “We’ve moved from digital collectibles to tangible products that people can wear, showing just how far the Web3 space has evolved. This collaboration demonstrates the potential of merging fitness, digital assets, and real-world products.”
The virtual half
Like Stepn before it, Stepn Go is a Web3 app that, per its whitepaper, combines fitness, social interaction, AI and blockchain. In psychological terms, however, it combines exercise with games and incentives.
These incentives are doled out, along some fairly complex rules, in the form of GMT, a crypto token. GMT is present on four blockchains – Solana, Binance Chain, Ethereum and Polygon – and on many crypto exchanges and is therefore exchangeable on secondary markets. It is also, of course, crucial to the app’s game.
Stepn Go users match their gameplay on the app with their running, jogging or walking in the physical world. On the app they spend tokens on virtual sneakers – NFTs – suitable for their level of fitness and then pledge to cover a certain distance within a certain time in the physical world. The app monitors their physical performance by a combination of GPS and the Stepn Model for Anti-Cheating (SMAC). SMAC uses “motion sensor and health data,” machine learning and what parent company FSL calls “desensitized GPS data.” (It’s unclear at press time what “desensitized” means, but it probably has something to do with user privacy.) Should disputes arise, there is a set of rules for judgments on “abnormal runs.”
There is, in addition, a sustainability angle to all this. The webpage for Stepn Go’s predecessor, Stepn, counts not just distance run and calories burned but also carbon offset, in kilograms. “As we started to design tokenomic in Sep 2021,” FSL co-founder Yawn Rong explained to Medium in 2023, “we realized the correlation between moving outdoors and curbing global warming – as people start to walk to commute or buy groceries, the fewer motor vehicles they use. So we made fighting against global warming via carbon offsetting one of our key objectives.”
An earlier step into the physical
This not the first physical Stepn sneaker. Before the Ultraboost 5 there was the Asics GT-2000 11 Solana, which sold at retail for USDC 200. (Solana is the aforementioned blockchain and USDC a crypto token pegged to the value of the US dollar.) The regular Adidas Ultraboost 5 sells for $190.
Stepn has also collaborated with Casio’s G-Shock. This was another raffle mint of NFTs on Mooar.
The Web3 company
Stepn and Stepn Go alike were developed by a company called Find Satoshi Labs (FSL), whose name is a reference to Satoshi Nakamoto, the anonymous inventor – or inventors – of Bitcoin.
Headquartered in Sydney, Australia, the company was founded in 2021 by Jerry Huang, a game developer, and the aforementioned Yawn Rong, an angel investor in crypto. Its CEO is Shiti Manghani, an electronics engineer.
