STEPN launches its own NFT marketplace

Find Satoshi Lab, the company behind the move-to-earn application STEPN, is releasing membership-based, multi-chain NFT marketplace MOOAR, aiming to establish a self-sustaining ecosystem for its product lineup.

MOOAR users will be able to purchase the sneakers necessary to use STEPN (which currently trade on Magic Eden at a floor price of 0.98 SOL, or about $32), as well as build and sell NFT collections on the platform. 

This move helps the company to develop its self-sustaining ecosystem, in addition to the existing STEPN fitness app and DOOAR, a Solana-based decentralized exchange (DEX). The goal is for the three apps to work “in collaboration to actively support each other,” the platform said in a statement.

Moreover, the platform is launching with zero fees and no optional royalties.

This autumn, NFT platforms X2Y2, Magic Eden, and most LooksRare have dropped the requirement to pay out royalties to creators when purchasing tokens.

STEPN COO, Shiti Rastogi Manghani, suggested that failing to support artists in the long term will be detrimental to the value of NFTs and that MOOAR aims to fairly compensate creators.

“You can already see on some of the platforms that have started the 0% royalty fee, that the downward trend on volumes is a sign of things to come,” he told CoinDesk. “This is why we’re taking such a hard and strong stance, that we want to stand by creators and we want to enforce this rule in the fee structure.”

Creators selling their NFTs on MOOAR can set royalty fees from 0.5% to 10%, with a default rate of 2%.

After releasing its flagship product STEPN at the end of 2021, Find Satoshi Lab reported $122.5 million in profits in Q2 2022. This June, the company released DOOAR, which currently has the largest number of daily active wallets across other DEXs running on Solana, as data from Dune Analytics shows.