By Albert Chen, CEO and co-founder, Genopets
Hot on the heels of GameFi, comes a Web3 trend that we expect to grow massively in the next 12 months Fitness finance, or FitnessFi, represents a step forward (pun intended) for the way people move, play and earn.
Inspired by the intersection of move, play, and earn, we see a growing opportunity in the fitness industry for Web3 to revolutionize how people are motivated to stay active. Combining the social incentives and accountability of Fitness Apps, with the fun and social interactions of movement based games, FitnessFi will bring Web3 to the fitness industry.
What’s clear is that gamifying and rewarding real world activity is ripe for disruption. For more than a decade, Fitness apps have been built on a model that centers around step goals and ‘badges’ for physical activity. More recently, apps like Sweatcoin and Paceline have explored rewards for movement, turning to rewards points and discounts on products as your incentive to stay active.
Consumers Invest in Fitness
Consumers are investing billions in products that help them track their fitness and motivate them to be active. More and more buying wearable devices to earn steps everywhere you go is becoming commonplace; a digital reminder to stay active on your wrist. The growth of the wearable device industry signals strong interest and consumer willingness to spend to encourage fitness.
Data from Statista shows end user spending on wearables was $81.5 billion last year, and is forecast to grow by 15% to nearly $94 billion this year. On top of that, it is forecast the number of wearable watches shipped will be 156m a year by 2024, an increase of 125% from 2019.
These devices paired with mobile phones give players access to a range of applications that can reward your daily activity.
As the market grows in size and technology continues to blur the lines between one’s physical and digital life, users seek more ways to motivate themselves to stay active and be digitally rewarded for their real world efforts. In the Web3 space most recently, this is becoming the rise of FitnessFi.
Enter the Fun
Alongside the phenomenal growth in the use of fitness trackers, there has also been a steady increase in gamified fitness experiences that make it ‘fun’ to stay active, move-to-play gaming.
As early as the advent of games like Dance Dance Revolution in the 90s, to Nintendo Wii, and PokemonGo more recently, movement and activity-based gaming have become a genre in the industry. Gaming itself, once thought of as a sedentary activity, has changed enormously: advances in technology, design, and social acceptance now allow true to life, interconnected experiences to be layered on top of the real world.
Alongside the ‘internet of value’ promised by Web3 and cryptocurrency, and the explosion of interest and individuality unlocked with non-fungible tokens (NFTs), there is a clear opportunity today to truly reward people for staying active, and turn steps and other activities into financial rewards.
Stepping into FitnessFi
Niantic’s success in creating PokemonGo! led to Pikmin Bloom and their AR SDK, which made it possible for developers to power their own AR and location-based gaming apps. Similarly, as Fitness becomes a larger category in the Web3 industry, the need to develop tooling and shared economies to scale the impact of Web3 on the space will become more prevalent.
Beginning with the integration of step counting with a dual-token earning economy, our approach to the idea of a fitness app is reshaping the space as a whole. NFTs allow us to provide players ownership over their fitness progress and reward them with the increased rarity of their assets as they invest in their well being.
Apple introduced Memojis. Now, imagine if Memojis could evolve based on health data and your motivation to stay fit became the appreciation of a digital asset that evolved with your activity. That is the experience we are pioneering and want to make possible for all players in the space.
As fitness apps look to the future of Web3, we plan to be the nexus that will allow them to seamlessly integrate ownership of assets and token economies into their ecosystems, in order to more effectively incentivize their user bases. The history of activity-based rewards has already started, but the future of Fitness will be Web3.
Genopets stands on the shoulders of giants. We’re privileged to have the vantage point to be able to build on these innovative models and pioneer a new direction for movement-based play. So many great projects have significantly impacted the creation of FitnessFi and formed a walkable path for Genopets to run. FitnessFi will be the dawn of a new era, incentivizing people to build healthy habits and rewarding users for being physically active and taking care of themselves.
Albert Chen, co-founder and CEO of Genopets is a serial entrepreneur with a track record of success. A founder of multiple e-commerce businesses with 8+ figures of revenue over the last 12 years, one of which was acquired by Elmer’s Products. Albert is a software engineer by training. He started his web3 career serializing and deserializing bitcoin transactions in 2017, winning multiple awards at hackathons across chains like EOS, 0x, and Nifty’s NFTs, Albert is dedicated to expanding the reach of web3 gaming to new players around the world. As CEO, Albert ensures the team remains flexible in its implementation, while staying committed to the company’s vision to create a world where everyone has the opportunity to enrich their life through self-care.
The views and opinions expressed herein are the views and opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Nasdaq, Inc.