Top crypto sector ‘move-to-earn’ is up 6% today, why?

Crypto’s move-to-earn sector is up 6.19% despite a 1.6% drawdown from the overall crypto market in the last 24 hours, according to CryptoSlate data.

The move-to-earn sector is a relatively small category with only 16 tokens from platforms that reward their user for their physical activities.

While interest in the sector has simmered in recent months, the market cap of assets in the industry witnessed an uptick during the reporting period thanks to the improved price performance of a few tokens.

STEPN is responsible for the uptick

Per CryptoSlate’s data, the best-performing move-to-earn token in the last 24 hours was STEPN. The web3 lifestyle native token GMT gained 11.06% in the previous 24 hours to trade at $0.42411 at the time of writing.

GMT is the native token of the move-to-earn NFT project and has a market cap of $251 million. The NFT project accounts for over 65% of the sector’s $374 million market cap.

The NFT gaming project launched in December 2021 to much fanfare on Solana Network, peaking in May 2022 with over 700,000 monthly users, according to Dune Analytics data.

However, the project has suffered several setbacks recently, including blocking GPS functions for its users in China and suffering a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack that wrongly identified users as bots.

All of these led to a drop in its users’ activity and a steep decline in the value of its tokens. Dune analytics data showed that the project recorded less than 45,000 users in February.

Meanwhile, the recent uptick was triggered by STEPN’s COO Shiti Manghani’s statement that the project would launch new features soon. According to Manghani, STEPN wants to onboard consumers from Web2 to Web3.

Besides GMT, the project’s other token, Green Satoshi Token (GST), rallied by 3.21% to $0.02617 at the time of writing. STEPN’s users earn GST for physical activities like jogging, running, etc.

Small-cap tokens pull surprises

Meanwhile, other tokens with a positive price performance during the reporting period included Genopets’ GENE and beFITTER’s FIU token, — the former gained 2.95%, while the latter rose 1.17%.

Genopets is a Solana-based move-to-earn and free-to-play NFT game rewarding players with crypto assets for staying active. With a market cap of $3.4 million, its trading volume in the last 24 hours was $291,000.

Unlike other move-to-earn platforms, beFITTER focuses on an overall healthy lifestyle, rewarding users for daily activities, including sleeping. The platform uses FIU to reward its users’ social interaction. The token has a market cap of $176,472.

Most move-to-earn tokens trade red

Meanwhile, most of the move-to-earn tokens tracked by CryptoSlate were down over the reporting period — 12 out of the 16 tokens averaged a loss of over 2% in the last 24 hours.

Per the data, Revolt 2 Earn’s RVLT saw the most significant loss of 5.28%, while Digital Fitness’ DEFIT shed 0.45%.

Besides that, all the tokens in the space are trading significantly below their all-time highs.