'Move-to-Earn' Application Stepn Suffers Cyber Attack After Upgrade

Users were recommended to "get some rest" while Stepn worked to secure its servers and recover from the various attacks.

AccessTimeIconJun 6, 2022 at 11:48 a.m. UTC
Updated May 11, 2023 at 6:49 p.m. UTC
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Stepn, a "move-to-earn" application on the Solana blockchain that gives users cryptocurrency rewards from walking or jogging, suffered multiple distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks following a recent upgrade.

  • Users were recommended to "get some rest" while Stepn worked to secure its servers and recover from the various attacks.
  • On Sunday, Stepn said on Twitter that its engineers were working to fix the problems, which could take between one to 12 hours. Nearly 24 hours later, the application is yet to announce whether the issue has been fixed.
  • The outage follows an "anti-cheating" upgrade introduced on June 3, which was aimed at eliminating bots from its platform and preventing rewards from being obtained through fraudulent motion data.
  • Stepn is a fitness app that rewards users for walking, jogging or running. They must first however purchase a virtual sneaker in the form of a non-fungible token (NFT). The prices of these sneakers are denominated in solana (SOL) and start from around $350 on NFT marketplace OpenSea.

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Jamie Crawley

Jamie Crawley is a CoinDesk news reporter based in London.


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