People want to be paid crypto to exercise in the Metaverse: Survey

A new survey has found that over 80% of people surveyed would be motivated to take up more physical exercise if they were paid in cryptocurrency for their efforts.

The survey, which was conducted by fitness website FitRated, asked 1,001 Americans for their thoughts on blockchain-related fitness technology.

The survey found that a staggering 40% of people surveyed would be willing to cancel their current physical gym membership for one in the Metaverse. 81% of respondents would be more motivated to stay fit if they were incentivized by cryptocurrency payments.

Previously, a study conducted by the ​​National Bureau of Economic Research concluded that money alone would not be enough to motivate people to go to the gym. According to FitRated’s research, however, blockchain-based financial incentives might just do the trick, with 63% of respondents agreeing that fitness motivation was a “primary benefit” of blockchain technology. Several move-to-earn projects are trying to capitalize on this.

The concept of “gamification” was found to be the primary reason behind why people may prefer blockchain-based financial incentives to standard monetary ones, with 83% of respondents saying that they liked the fact that blockchain-based fitness applications gamified physical activity.

When asked what types of fitness they would undertake to earn crypto, 49.1% of respondents said that walking would be the activity of choice. This was closely followed by cycling at 47.2% and swimming came in third at 41.4%.

When it came to looking at what cryptocurrency people wanted to be paid in, Bitcoin (BTC) was overwhelmingly the preferred choice, with 72% of respondents opting for BTC. Ether (ETH) was a distant second at 35.5%, followed closely by Dogecoin (DOGE) at 34.6%.

Blockchain-based fitness apps are currently on the rise. A Web3 move-to-earn application called STEPN — which gamifies the experience of running by providing users the ability to mint unique nonfungible tokens (NFT) shoes — has been a pioneer in the blockchain fitness space.

While STEPN may be one of the more well-established Web3 applications in the fitness world, it certainly isn’t alone. Another move-to-earn app called Step App, which runs on the Avalanche blockchain, emerged as a competitor, signaling the push of Web3 companies looking to tap into the $100 billion fitness industry.