Blockchain game StepN, a “move-to-earn” fitness application on the Solana blockchain that let users walk and run to earn tokens, suffered a number of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks this weekend following a recent upgrade.
According to StepN’s official twitter, its engineers were working overnight to fix the problems at the time of writing, users were recommended to take rest during the maintenance while the engineering team secure its servers.
“We have been under multiple DDOS attacks in the past hours. Securing the servers and recovery may take anywhere from 1 to 12 hours,” StepN said in a twitter post.
The application is yet to announce whether the issue has been fixed.
The distributed network attacks follows an "anti-cheating" upgrade introduced on June 3, which was aimed at eliminating bots from its platform and preventing rewards from being obtained through fraudulent motion data.
StepN suffered a series of cyber attacks from Hackers. In April and May, the application said hackers were trying to paralyze the networks by sending millions of DDOS attacks.
StepN was at the center of debate after the app announced May 26 in an official post that it would disconnect users with a GPS signal in mainland China to ensure it complied with Beijing’s rules. The announcement brings down the price of its native token called Green Metaverse Token (GMT) by 14%.
The move-to-earn game, which market itself as a Web 3 lifestyle app, has two tokens-one for utility (GST) and another for governance (GMT).
Founded by Huang and his co-founder Yawn Rong in Adelaide, Australia, StepN debuted at a Solana hackathon in October 2021 and later launched a beta version in December.
By far, StepN had amassed more than 10,000 downloads via the app stores. Data from Dune Analytics also shows that daily active users of stepN reached 800,000.
According to cryptocurrency price tracker Coingecko, STEPN’s fungible tokens have also skyrocketed in recent weeks. The game’s governance token, GMT, reached an all-time high of $4.11 in April after trading for cents a few weeks earlier. GST, earned through playing the game, saw a similar rise, stood at $8.51 as move-to-earn mania hit a peak in late Apri.
However, there are serious questions around the sustainability of such play-to-earn games.
Critics points out that gameplay needs to be addictive that users continue to play without cashing out their coins, If demand for new sneakers dries up, their price on the secondary market will fall, while more cash leave the game, the value and motivation for StepN diminishes over time.
The classic example of this would be a game called Axie Infinity, developed by Sky Mavis, the studio has seen players interest diminished over time, the price of AXS fall sharply as result of it.