Rong and Huang now lead a team of over 100 employees, and they’re still hiring. The company reported $122.5 million in second-quarter profits.

At its peak, the company claims to have had over 4 million monthly active users.

To make this happen, Rong says he and the team worked “seven days a week, around 15 to 20 hours a day.” And over the next year, while it seemed like most of crypto languished and lurched from one embarrassment to another, Stepn quietly found a massive audience. Stepn hit Apple’s App Store in early 2022. The idea would evolve into Stepn, which the founders now describe as a “Web3 lifestyle app,” that uses crypto-fueled rewards to get people to exercise. Rong and Huang scuttled the game’s storyline and focused on the core concept: Just walk. As Rong now describes it, the feedback was clear: “It’s a stupid idea.” And this would all be done outside to make it COVID-friendly. Instead of moving Mario from left to right on the screen, you would see the game from a first-person perspective and you would actually walk through the game’s levels. Īlong with his neighbor and friend Jerry Huang, who ran a computer game company, Rong had the idea of creating a kind of Super Mario Brothers game that incorporates real-life walking. This feature is part of CoinDesk's Culture Week. He once worked a McDonald’s night shift, he worked at an Australian mining company (digging for zinc and gold, not bitcoin), he launched a Vietnamese restaurant franchise and he co-founded a crypto investment and trading fund. Maybe he could turn this into a game? By then Rong, 38, was an entrepreneur with a wacky resume. So Rong’s neighbors were walking more than he had ever seen in his life – walking dogs, walking babies, walking just to clear their heads. Just about the only thing you could do was walk.

Thanks to the COVID-19 restrictions, you were not allowed to drive anywhere. That was what Yawn Rong realized in Adelaide, Australia, during the summer of 2021. Join the most important conversation in crypto and web3! Secure your seat todayĪll you could do is walk.

Myfitnesspal for bariatric patients