April 21, 2022. That was the day my StepN began. I had been telling myself it started sometime around 2020, but when I traced the wallet records, the opening date was there to the day. Memory is unreliable. The numbers written onto the chain are not.

Back then, 1 GST was worth about 5.4 dollars—roughly 870 yen. You walked, and the shoes made money. That spring, people all over the world believed the same thing and went outside for the same reason. I was one of them. To be honest, the first reason I stepped out was neither health nor habit. It was that it paid.

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01 ／ THE DREAM’S LIFESPANThe dream ended before the walking did

The chart below overlays the amount of GST I earned by walking over 4 years (the gray bars) with the price of a single token (the blue line).

Monthly GST earned (gray bars) overlaid with the price per token (blue line). 2022–2026.

Look at the blue line. That is the lifespan of the dream I saw.

A GST worth 5.42 dollars (about 870 yen) in April 2022 was already down to 0.36 dollars (about 58 yen) by June. By August, 0.05 dollars (about 8 yen). In just 4 months it fell to 1/10 of 1/10. Less like a cliff than like the floor giving way beneath it. I remember watching the screen and thinking: this much fervor can evaporate this fast.

And now? In May 2026, 1 GST is 0.0016 dollars—less than 1/3 of a yen. About 1/3,300 of what it was on the first day.

Over 4 years I earned roughly 29,944 GST by walking. Summed at the exchange rate of the moment each was cashed out, the actual value came to 2,958 dollars—about 480,000 yen at today’s rate. 4 years, 480,000 yen. Averaged by month, I was walking outside for a “reward” worth a few cans of coffee.

02 ／ THE PHANTOMThe $162,000 (¥26 million) that was never there

Here a temptation appears.

If I had sold all 29,944 of those tokens at that highest April-2022 price of 5.42 dollars, the math comes to over 162,000 dollars. In yen, 26 million. The gap from the 2,958 dollars (about 480,000 yen) I actually received is 159,000 dollars—25.6 million yen.

The moment you see the figure, something stirs in your chest. If only I’d sold it all back then. If only I’d cashed out at the peak.

But it is a phantom. You cannot, in principle, hold in a single instant something you earned little by little across 4 years of walking. “If only I’d sold it all at the peak” is nothing more than the past folded up conveniently, an impossible assumption.

And yet this is the version people remember. Not the 480,000 yen in hand, but the 25.6 million yen that slipped away.

Beating yourself with an ideal—
this, I think, is what that looks like.

03 ／ PRICE vs STEPSThe price fell. The walking didn’t.

Look at the chart again, this time at the gray bars.

The blue line sinks until it crawls along the ground, but the gray bars do not disappear. If anything, they stand taller in the later years. The month I earned the most by walking was September 2025—about 3,973 tokens. That was the year the price had fallen to 1/3,000 of where it began.

Here is a fact I cannot quite explain about myself.

If I had been someone who walked in order to earn, I would have quit back in the summer of 2022, when the price hit 1/10 of its peak. It wasn’t worth it. The reason to walk was gone. And indeed, that summer, many people left StepN.

But I didn’t stop. Even when the price had fallen to 1/4,000, I was still lacing up my shoes for a few cans of coffee.

The reason is probably simple. Somewhere along the way, walking had come loose from money. The reward was supposed to be the motive, yet after the reward vanished, the act alone remained. On the chart, the blue line and the gray bars come fully apart—and that single point is, I think, the most accurate record of what happened to me over these 4 years.

04 ／ WHAT REMAINEDI only started walking once it stopped paying

So this is not a story about walking to earn.

It is a story about what was left once the earning was gone.

From the day the shoes stopped making money, my walks finally became my own. Not for a reward someone else designed, not for a collapsing line on a chart, but simply because the air outside feels good, because my head goes quiet when I walk.

2,958 dollars—about 480,000 yen. As a “reward” for 4 years, it is laughably small. But the crowd of gray bars standing beside that number—the record that kept standing, not one bar missing, even after the price fell through the floor—cannot be converted into money.

There’s no need to hurry. This is my road.