Conflux co-founder： How did StepN on BNBchain collapse？

Author: @forgivenever

Stepn is currently in a recession, where the Solana chain is still maintaining the economic cycle, but the Bsc chain has completely burst the bubble. This article is a brief review of the tumbling gold rush that lasted a month.

On April 20, Bsc chain sneakers started initial sale and hackers snapped them up quickly. On April 24, hackers sold them at a profit, at which point the grey sneaker floor price was $2,500 and the green sneaker floor price was $12,000. From April 26 to 28, the grey sneaker floor price rose to over 20 BNB. On April 30, the Stepn team announced the airdrop of Solana chain sneaker, Bsc chain users dumped sneakers due to panic, causing the floor price to drop to 4–5 BNB. From April 30 to May 1, the first batch of Chinese institutional speculators entered the market, they went bottom fishing, buying 30 pairs of sneakers per capita.

From May 2 to 9, the price of sneakers rose to 30–40BNB, when the number of addresses was close to 3000. Then a second group of Chinese institutional speculators entered the market, depositing 40,000BNB in two days. From May 10 to 14, the Luna crash caused the market to plummet, and the sneaker floor price fell below 10 BNB, but then immediately rebounded. From May 15 to 20, the sneaker floor price rebounded to 35 BNB, and a large number of Solana users switched to the Bsc chain. Meanwhile a third group of Chinese institutional speculators entered the market, depositing 90,000 BNB in a single day, and the number of addresses soared to 18,000. Speculative tutorials began to appear online, with claims of 4-day payback.

From May 20 to 26, more Chinese institutional speculators poured into the market, with one large investor buying 1,200 pairs of sneakers on the 26th and depositing 280,000 BNB in a single day. At this point, the speculative bubble reached its peak, with the number of addresses exceeding 50,000, including 20,000 to 30,000 real users.

On May 27th, the Stepn team announced that they were abandoning the mainland China market, which meant that there were no new users coming in to take on this Ponzi game. From May 27 to 29, the Bsc chain bubble began to burst, and the floor price fell to 3 BNB in two days, close to the cost of mint sneakers.

The whole bubble went through three underestimations, the hacked shoe sale, the Solana chain airdrop and the Luna crash, until the final bubble burst. During the process, minting a pair of sneakers was evaluating profits of $2,500 to $6,000. Speculators would buy bGST in large quantities, causing bGST prices to remain high, reaching a high of $50 and a low of $10.

In terms of the extent of the bubble, Stepn is a pure Ponzi game, with a dearth of real user growth, except for airdrop users, and the vast majority of profits coming from users who entered the game relatively late. It is estimated that users who started to enter before the third group of Chinese institutional speculators entered the market could still profit, but those who entered after that time lost money.

Stepn, with data that is not visible to the outside world, should have realized this problem long ago and could have transferred the profits of speculators to campaigners through macro-regulation. But before the new version of the APP is launched, there is already a situation where the mint price is equal to the market price, and even the price is upside down. So, under the slogan of “4 days back to capital”, the booming gold rush instantly collapsed.

Bsc chain speculators can get 6 to 10 times profit under the premise of cautiously expanding capacity, and the Stepn team earned 140,000 BNB during the month. Users who received airdrops were also able to earn between $1,500 and $3,000 per day during this time. And the users who came in around the last 10 days became the source of profit.

Link：https://twitter.com/forgivenever/status/1530727238651367424