Dawn Yet?

An analysis of Solana’s GST price

In this writing, I will examine some plausible causes that account for GST price fluctuation.

Word Count: 1265

GST price on Solana has been going stable at 0.05 ~ 0.06 for a while.

Two weeks ago, we were still experiencing a death spiral.

Although it is assuring to see a stabilized price and think that STEPN’s anti-Ponzi strategy really worked, something could be lurking around.

This writing will focus on two dates: the 18th when the HP update was implemented; the 23rd when the big pump happened.

Thanks to Dune and @levilin2008 for this amazing Dooar Dex graph.

As shown on the graph, before the big PUMP, users are selling much more GST than buying them.

After the PUMP, although the selling continued for a while, it stopped when GST reached 0.05.

Lately, we see GST are bought for the same amount, sometimes more, compared to GST being sold.

Two routes looking at this event: GSTs have not made their way to the market or GST that made it to the market but have been bought back by someone.

Before anything, let us look at GST volume (Data from CMC).

Before the PUMP and after the PUMP, GST Volume remained in the range of 3-8Million.

The price of GST, though, was decreasing before the PUMP and stabilized after the PUMP.

This suggests that there is much more GST being sold before the PUMP since there is no buying power back then.

Given that the HP system would not really kick in at this moment, it is clear that GSTs are not fully sold after the PUMP.

[]GSTs have not made their way to the market

There are two conditions, GST being consumed and GST being hoarded.

First, GSTs burned in-game.

There are many GST-burning mechanisms.

Three major consumptions are Mystery Box, Repair, and Minting.

1: For mystery boxes, it might burn GST, but would not necessarily decrease the overall GST production.

The new update increased the base cost for opening boxes and the acceleration fee.

At the same time, made boxes above tier4 more lucrative.

However, to obtain tier 4 and above boxes requires a decent amount of luck and energy (Krit had a nice chart here @Krit_STEPN).

Building a shoe takes time and money. Compared to building a luck shoe from scratch, users are more inclined to slot some gems or slide some attributes from efficiency.

For high-end investors/players, most of them had a crazy box opener way ahead of time since the GST cap requires loads of GMT to unlock.

In either case, there is no incentive for people to stop producing GST.

So is GST used in box opening?

If true, we should be looking at a spike in Gems’ supply and a dip in Gem price yes?

Looking at the number of gems on the market, despite a huge increase right after the update, it is not continuously increasing (shoutout to @Buffybub for providing the data).

As a noob-level gem runner who opens mostly tier 3 and 4 boxes, I did not see the floor price of lv1 gems change too much in the last two weeks either (Check 7 days stats @StepnFP https://stepnfp.com/).

So if GST is really being burned into Gem production, where did all the gems go?

I know I am selling the gems, but who is buying them?

The most ecologically friendly condition is that people are really “Gaming”.

Gamers keep getting the gem and upgrading them to the top. To verify this, we should stay tuned to social media and the marketplace to see if there are lv7 or lv8 gems.

This is the most ecologically friendly explanation is because STEPN used a non-linear attribute calculation formula.

Although Lv7 can bring crazy attributes, an extremely high number in one attribute would not bring that much production efficiency, which means the market will not be flooded with GST or GEMs (or GMT in the future).

Despite the temptation to believe people are gamers, STEPN, as it claimed itself to be, is a finance app. Most people are here to MovetoEarn, so it is unlikely that many users would opt for a route that has little profit, especially when the social element is not properly built.

If there is no upgrade and large-scale selling, someone must be hoarding them for future dumping, which is not good news.

The story of minting is quite straightforward, you will lose money if you do it.

That is also why people are minting less and there are not many new shoes on the market.

The number of mints has been under 1000 lately.

Unless people are also hoarding shoes, minting does not consume much GST.

For Repair, obviously now we also have Restore, the cost of GST varies.

The Restore mechanism had a huge impact on shoes with lower comfort attributes, mostly common shoes (shoutout to StepnSideKick for the gorgeous app @STEPNsidekick).

But the restoration and reparation process does not cost much GST themselves if you have the attribute right (Another chart from Krit for Comfort attribute).

And remember that STEPN’s formula gives the biggest boost when you are increasing low attributes. As demonstrated by Krit, a spit of C allows you to use the HP for a long time without restoration.

Not to mention the system has only been working for 2 weeks, so no one needs to restore HP this fast.

All things considered, double-Rs should not be consuming too much GST

What might cause an effect is when single common runners dumped their shoes.

So overall less GST is being produced.

In the pre-HP era, the single common was the most profitable, yet the safest strategy.

For the simple fact that it gets you 2 energies with minimal investment.

Judging by the fact that the whole dumping process took 3days and there are 2000 more shoes on the market on the 19th than the previous two days, plus the fact that not many uncommon shoes are being sold, single common shoe dumping is a thing.

Additionally, we see an increment in user activity on the 19th and the following six days. Presumably, users are all selling and buying (We can only monitor wallet active, again shoutout to @0xeArt).

The problem is, user activity was only down 2000, from 6000 to 4000. In the most extreme condition, when all single common runners fled the game and assumed all of them can earn 9 GSTs per day (the most optimal outcome with lv9 common shoes), 2000 shoes can only produce 18000GSTs.

The trading volume in Dooar is counted using millions. Mere 18k GST cannot even make a splash in the pool.

【GSTs are being bought】

There are some future expectations regarding GST prices.

It goes without saying that something happened on the 23rd.

I shall not call out the suspicious entity.

But the nature of the entity has every motivation to pump the price and they are certainly capable of doing that.

The occurrence of the first pumping makes it reasonable for people to believe a second wave. Hence getting ready for that by hodling their GST.

Additionally, Yawn just posted a poster saying “Sun will rise” with Sol and BSC logos.

Something big is coming onto Sol, and GST’s price will rise, at least that is the belief.

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In conclusion, much evidence suggests there is a large amount of GST ready to flood the market. This writing is not financial advice, we are pointing out some potential dangers.

Let me know what you think.