STEPN Headed for a Meltdown? | Anti-Cheat Leads to Massive DDOS Attack

STEPN has been down for over 24 hours. It doesn't look great.

STEPN Anti-Cheat Launch and Crash

Before you say anything, yes I reused the graphic I made for my recent article on why I think move 2 earn apps like this are ponzi schemes. It's one of my favorite graphics I've ever made so I just had to. It really sums up this whole situation. You know how I feel about Solana at this point, and STEPN is built on it so... I might be a little biased, but for good reason. STEPN is a move 2 earn app that allows you to earn crypto by being active but it requires quite a large investment to get started.

Any time you have an app like this that people can find a way to exploit, people are going to exploit it. People are going to use different bots, multiple accounts, GPS spoofing, and more to maximize the amount they earn. This happens with literally anything that has a potential financial gain, hell it even happens on games and apps that don't reward you with crypto.

One way to make your ponzi scheme look more legit and try to keep it afloat longer is to try to stop people from cheating. According to their Twitter thread, STEPN has created a revolutionary anti-cheat AI. Then the service was immediately attacked.

There's a lot to unpack in this Twitter thread that kinda intrigues me. They state that cheaters risk artificially inflating the token and NFT prices, but the system already does that. Literally as people use the app, new tokens are minted, and there's an unlimited supply. They also claim that it's unethical, which is debatable. I guess it really depends who you ask and what the context is.

Their developers have been studying your location, motion sensor, and health data for months. What, you though giving this app all those permissions was just so you could earn? Mmmm mm no no no, it's being mined, used to develop more ways to prevent you from earning, and probably sold (cannot confirm). Supposedly cheaters are flagged by AI and machine learning, which are nowhere near perfect.

If the bot decides you're cheating, your NFTs could take "damage" and you are not rewarded for the session. They also stated that they could be introducing more penalties in the future... Hmm... They also state that the app may not punish you right away if you're flagged as cheating. They may wait and punish you later. But nearly immediately, the bot is flagging people incorrectly. A lot of them.

The user above lost 116 GST, which is about $74 right now, and is also subject to the repair fee to repair their NFT to keep going. If you take a scroll through the comments on this thread, it's literally nothing but people being flagged incorrectly. Even people that are cheating are going to complain, but people that genuinely invested are suffering. It's bad enough that this thing runs on Solana, but now people are losing money because their anti-cheat bot sucks.

Considering the sheer amount of money these people invested, this is extremely frustrating. Hopefully the people incorrectly flagged will be rectified and they'll get their rewards before this thing collapses. I have little to no faith in this platform to be honest, and I do still think it's a ponzi scheme. You know what happens to ponzi schemes.

To make things worse, during the fallout of their anti-cheat mechanism launch... STEPN is under attack! The service is under DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack, meaning their service is being flooded with requests on the backend so hard that the system stops functioning. Seems they pissed off some people with their new mechanism.

Don't worry though, they gave their users permission to take a break from earning. They stated that the recovery process could take up to 12 hours... and here we are 24 hours later with no update. I'm no hacker but I do have a general understanding of how these attacks work. The easy solution would have been to have a plan in place for this but... Why plan ahead?

Maybe take some of the hundreds of millions of dollars you have made off these poor investors and hire some cyber security experts? Why not have a plan for DDOS attacks like having a server ready to deploy in case of a crisis? How crazy would it be to have a back up plan? Do they even care?

Even on the thread where they announced they're under attacked, people are still trying to use the app. They're gunna have a metric shit ton of complaints... This is no way to handle a situation like this. Looks really shady honestly considering some of these people are just trying to make their money back from their initial investments.

Have no fear though! They still hosted a Twitter space talking about the launch of their NFTs on BNB Chain. That's really what important to them so they can start selling them and make some more money. If they really had any care in the world to take care of their users, they would have delayed this launch.

Doing a launch an announcement while your app is under attack is kinda shitty. Not only does it look like you don't care about your users, but it makes them trust you less. Things are not looking good, bois.

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