https://liberlandpress.com/2023/12/11/sweatcoin-running-at-nearcon/
By Jillian Godsil
Q&A with Oleg Fomenko, co founder of Sweatcoin
I have the pleasure of knowing Oleg from long ago and interviewed him back in 2022 – please read about his startup here in my founder interview. Then last week, we reconnected again at NEARCon and I was delighted to pose some new, challenging questions to the energetic founder.
1. You said at the launch of Sweatcoin in London that it was inspired in part by the human orgasm. What still keeps you excited about the project?
OF: It is not often that one has an opportunity to work on creating a new ECONOMY. Not a product, not a product category, but a whole new MOVEMENT ECONOMY built around the value of your physical activity. We all know that your physical activity has value to you, to your family, to your healthcare provider, to your insurer, to your employer, to the country where you pay taxes. By creating $SWEAT, which is the tokenized physical activity, we can now power exchanges of value between these parties listed above. Think of it as Attention Economy, which is estimated to be up to 7 trillion dollars in size, but built around physical activity. This will make the world a lot more active for sure!!!
2. Are you in the highest percentile of Sweatcoin exercisers? What is your poison – walking, jogging, running, horizontal jogging?
OF: Sadly, no … I have too much fun working and building the MOVEMENT ECONOMY, but I am for sure not in the lowest percentile. My dog – Bear – is helping me to start my day with being active and often pushes me to leave my desk at the close of the day too!
3. How did you choose NEAR as your blockchain partner?
OF: We have spoken and evaluated 14 different chains and it was hard to make a direct comparison, so we went back to first principles and compared them on what we value as a project:
3.1 Alignment on vision and strategy
Many chains were talking about bringing in new users to web3, but only a handful were consistent with this claim in their technology. Many EVMs for example still have transaction costs in the region of 50 cents to 1 dollar. How could this help with mass-adoption?
3.2 Chemistry with the team
Every partnership goes through peaks and valleys and it is extremely important to have a team that one enjoys dealing with and can have difficult conversations with. Illia and Alex have managed to build an increadible team that we truly enjoy working with
3.3 Technology
Our project is about making THE WORLD more physically active. And this means that we need a chain that is able to serve hundreds of millions of users without falling over, offer really cheap transactions as the next billion is not going to be reach AND MOST IMPORTANTLY – offer an incredibly good user experience on wallet creation and management. And Near is unbeatable on all three.
4. Were you surprised by the sheer number of Sweatcoin crypto wallets opened?
OF: Yes we were, but we were also pleased because it means that we truly managed to address the two biggest barriers that prevent people from engaging with web3:
4.1 Barrier 1 – Complex User Experience and language.
Many users tried to create an account, but bulked at 24-word “seed phrase” and inability to take a screenshot or copy it into a password manager as well as incomprehensible language of “hodl”, “budl”, “non-custody”, “finality” and much more.
With Sweat Wallet all that users need to create their wallet is to confirm their email and we worked hard to simplify the language we use. For example instead of “staking” our users use “growth jars” J
4.2 Barrier 2 – need to part with a lot of money to buy your crypto as a first step
Mainstream users are used to mainstream media coverage of crypto, which focuses on “hack here” and “attack there” and they feel very nervous about parting with hundreds of dollars of their hard-earned cash at the door. They would far prefer to be able to walk in, familiarise themselves before making a decision to pay or not.
This is exactly what we deliver on – we literally let people “Walk into crypto” and get their first crypto from nothing else but being physically active and engaged.
5. Do you think your audience understands crypto?
OF: I do not think the audience needs to understand “crypto” more than they need to understand “internet”, “cloud” or “http”. What users need are products that solve their problems and make their lives more engaging and rewarding and this is exactly what we are missing at the moment – a simple product that appeals to the billions of people and which will bring adoption of blockchain and crypto tech without people even realising what they are using. Internet was brought into everyone’s life and home by the email – an opportunity to send and receive messages for free and in real time. We need the “email for web3” and we believe that tokenization of your physical activity and making it into a liquid asset for you is one of these use cases with appeal to a billion users. After all, the only thing you need to walk into crypto is a pair of legs and a smart phone J
6. Does it matter?
OF: No, it does not. What matters is us focusing on building products, categories and whole economies that engage billions of people. The metric of success should be “active users” not “TVL” and then we will see a lot more innovation in this field.
7. Name your biggest fan crush and why?
OF: My biggest fan crush is our user Phatt One. He installed Sweatcoin in 2016 while he was barely making few hundred steps per day. By 2017 he was making few thousand steps per day and right now he is one of our biggest advocates with the average step count of more than 100k steps PER DAY. I am worried about his knees, but he says that this is really working for him and he loves the fact that we truly helped him to understand how valuable it is to be active. Chris – his real name – has recently got married and I would really love to send him congratulations and best wishes from the whole team at Sweatcoin and Sweat Economy.
8. What keeps you powering Sweatcoin – what are the future plans?
OF: Small point of order – we have two businesses now: 1) Sweatcoin is our web2 Health&Fitness app with more than 150 million users around the world and 2) Sweat Economy – our web3 business consisting of Sweat Wallet with close to 10 million users and $SWEAT – token which is 9th widest-held and 13th most actively used token in the world. Also, Sweat Wallet is consistently in top3 dapps on DappRadar: https://dappradar.com/rankings
So, the next step for Sweatcoin is to continue growing around the world and making more people more active! For Sweat Wallet and $SWEAT the next step is to continue driving token utility, continue being deflationary and to bring in the next 100 million people into web3 to create the Movement Economy where your physical activity has tangible value.
9. Do you think walk to earn will ever tire?
OF: I am sure that “walk to earn” as a term will be superseded by the “Movement Economy”. It is bigger, bolder but expresses what it is a lot better than “walk to earn”. We use “Attention Economy” in our everyday language, not “pay attention to earn” J
10. What do you like about NEARcon?
OF: The energy of the community that loves the fact that Illia is coming back as a CEO and the Board Member of Near Foundation and his vision to make Near into an entry point into web3 for the next billion people. We at Sweat Economy are really excited about our partnership with them and the fact that we are so aligned on the mission! And it is an incredible fun to be spending more time with these people in real life. It inspires creativity and energises me and my team!
11. What makes Lisbon such an attractive conference city?
OF: Lisbon is one of the best places for conferences I have been to because it combines charm of an old European town with centuries of history with incredibly modern infrastructure, short distances that make it walkable and sweatable (you see what I did there?) amazing weather year around and huge concentration of web3 talent on the ground.
12. Where else would you live in the world (if not Lisbon)?
OF: At the moment I can not think of a better place to live than Lisbon and its surroundings, however, this is already my 5th country of residence and I know that few years down the line we might decide to move. Where to is a mystery for now.