Crypto’s latest fad, “Move-to-Earn” (M2E), entices you with the promise of earning back money by exercising, but seldom delivers: A wave of Web3 fitness-focused metaverse companies called “Move to Earn,” emerged this spring, ushered by an app called Stepn, a blockchain-powered platform that pays you to walk in real life. The concept behind the app is simple in theory: The app tracks your movements and you get paid in in-game currency for walking. The currency can be used to upgrade equipment and avatars in the games and be converted into cash. The catch? To participate in Stepn, users need to buy a non-fungible-token (NFT) “sneaker.”

Getting your hands on an NFT Sneaker is easy (sort of): NFT sneakers are necessary to begin earning Green Satoshi Tokens, Stepn’s cryptocurrency. To do this, you’ll need to purchase Solana cryptocurrency to purchase the sneakers, which means you need a crypto wallet, such as Metamask. There are different kinds of NFT sneakers with various “attributes” including efficiency, luck, and comfort, that determine how much money you can make.

But it’s going to cost you: The cheapest tokens cost a couple of hundred USDs and only allow you to earn money very slowly. The high-end versions can cost up to tens of thousands of USDs. And that’s not all: sneakers require constant repairs that, yes, require you to part with more of your money.

It doesn’t matter how far you run: You’re probably not getting your money back. After they began walking, users soon realized that they were only making pennies back on their original spend, Forkast reports. Cheaper, low-performance sneakers can only make users more money if they invest more money in improving their attributes. There is also a 10-minute cap on how long you can run with using a “common” shoe; to run for up to 100 minutes a day users need to either buy 10 common sneakers, or a more expensive (“epic” or “legendary”) model. With all the hidden fees and unclear instructions, many players found themselves unable to earn back the price of the sneakers they purchased.

Then there’s the hit on the currency: Users have been hurt by the crypto crash this year, which has seen the value of Solana and Stepn tokens plunge. A falling user base and the company’s exit from China didn’t help matters. Solana has plummeted more than 77% so far this year while the Green Satoshi Token has lost almost all of its value in just the past three months.

It sounds too good to be true, so why did people fall for it? Stepn was launched in the wake of the GameFi phenomenon, which saw the rise of popular play-to-earn games like Axie Infinity which allowed gamers to play to earn cryptocurrency. M2E games became popular in the spring right before the crypto bubble burst, New York Magzine’s Intelligencer reports. Stepn also had the added advantage of being backed by Sequoia Capital, one of the most respected VC firms in Silicon Valley (which invested in some of the biggest players in the startup world, from Apple to Instacart), and by the venture-funding arm of Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange.

Stepn insists that it is not a Ponzi scheme: M2E companies are facing allegations similar to those that followed play-to-earn companies. Critics point to the app’s high entry cost, and constant need for new users to join and old users to not simultaneously cash out, to avoid crashing the token price, Vice reports. The app’s unsustainable model has been likened to Ponzi schemes, prompting Stepn’s creators to acknowledge their model’s similarity to Ponzi schemes but insist they are different and perfectly ethical.