Could Wellness Be an Onramp to Web3? Moonwalk Fitness’ Caitlin Cook Thinks So

There’s no shortage of crypto projects that have been touted as the thing that will onboard the next billion users to Web3, but Moonwalk Fitness has a slightly different approach — wellness.

The fitness accountability app, which launched for iOS and Android earlier this year, essentially offers users a way to bet on whether they’ll meet their fitness goals — for now, that’s daily steps, but Moonwalk Fitness’ Director of Growth Caitlin Cook — speaking with CoinDesk ahead of Consensus 2025 in Toronto — that the project hopes to add different types of in-app fitness challenges and metrics beyond step count.

In its current form, Moonwalk Fitness presents users with a variety of games to choose from, varying in duration, step-count, and buy-in price. Users have to pay a fee (in USDC, BONK, or SOL) to join the game. If they hit their daily step goals, they get all their money back – plus the opportunity to split a prize pool, created from the deposits of users who didn’t meet their step goals. In this way, Moonwalk Fitness offers users both a carrot — the potential to make money — and a stick — the potential to lose money — in their fitness journeys.

Read more: How to Make or Lose Hundreds of Dollars Betting Crypto on Your Fitness Goals

Cook said users all around the world are finding their way to Moonwalk Fitness , adding that she was particularly bullish on markets like Southeast Asia and Africa. Because users can create their own games, setting their own buy-in prices, there is no financial barrier to entry.

“What’s enough for someone to actually perform the action is different depending on where you are,” Cook said. “So we have games where [the buy-in] is a very tiny amount of BONK, where maybe it’s a couple dollars in USDC, and people are eating it up,” Cook said. “Becasue instead of gatekeeping it, where it’s like, ‘oh, you need X amount of money to join, we’re opening it up to everyone.”

The project’s four biggest markets are currently France, the U.S., Nigeria and Vietnam, Cook said.

“I think a lot of crypto builders generally tend to focus on the same markets where it’s like the more affluent people who get to deploy capital,” Cook said. “If you have legs that work, you can use this product. The total addressable market is quite large.”

Seeing the growing adoption of Moonwalk Fitness around the world has been exciting, Cook said.

“Opening our Twitter every day is incredible, because it’s like, I’ll see a group of Venezuelan grandmas going for a walk together, posing for a picture, which is so cool,” she said. “We just had people do a meet up in Turkey that we did not organize. It was just like a group thing where they just decided to go out and walk. The appeal is very broad.”

Even for people who are already active, Cook said the ability to make money from something they’re already doing makes Moonwalk Fitness appealing.

“We see that in Nigeria, for example, they’re walking so much, and they’re like, ‘Oh, my God, I can make money from something I’m doing already.’ And it’s like, yes, you can. It’s a fun way to make something that’s ordinary a little bit more gamified in a super simple way.”