The new fitness app rewards British users’ one coin of sweatcoin virtual currency for every 1,000 steps which can be used to buy goods and services.
The British made app is the latest initiative in a growing fitness economy. Co-founded by Oleg Fomenko, Anton Derlyatka, Danil Perushev and Egor Khmelev it features monitoring devices and apps, that will reward peoples’ fitness activity with vouchers and discounts.
This application is currently only available on iPad and iPhone in the UK. The user will receive one sweatcoin with rewards ranging in value on the Sweatcoin shop for their every 1000 steps. Every sweatcoin range rewards you with a specific product like 50 sweatcoins gives Wii console and a Wii bundle kit, 20 sweatcoins gives a pair of Apple headphones etc.
The objective of this application is to fix an evolutionary bug called ‘Present Bias.’ This bug is the human tendency to underestimate things which happen in the future. Thus it focuses our attention solely on what gives us pleasure right now.
Oleg Fomenko, one of the Russian co-founders of Sweatcoin said that, “Sweatcoin can only be issued on the basis of verified movement, and for that we use quantity of movement and geographical location, which can’t be put into the public domain.” He added saying, “Once issued, we are keen to ensure that Sweatcoin can be accepted and exchanged between any willing parties while allowing us to focus on objective one, which is best done in a decentralized fashion.”
The working mechanism of sweatcoin as described in its website is that, it verifies the steps using phone’s accelerometers and GPS location, those steps get converted into sweatcoins at a conversion ratio of 1,000 verified steps to 1 SWC and finally the users can spend their sweatcoins at in-app shop section on products and services.
Fomenko’s previous app was Bloom.fm which is a music app that launched in the UK in 2013 with over 1.3 million downloads.
