In an exclusive interview with cryptonews.com, Oleg Fomenko, Co-Founder of Sweat Economy, talks about the founding story of Sweatcoin, the move-to-earn industry, and protecting data privacy in the fitness industry.

About Oleg Fomenko

Oleg Fomenko is the Co-Founder of Sweat Economy, which is establishing the movement economy by realizing the value of physical activities and rewarding all forms of movement. Nine years prior to the conception of Sweat Economy, Oleg co-founded Sweatcoin, a digital currency backed by physical movement within the Sweat Economy ecosystem. Oleg has more than 15 years of experience as an entrepreneur. As founder of bloom.fm, he spearheaded a £16M funding raise, attracting 1.2 million registered users in the UK and offering the world’s first £1 per month subscription service. He has a wealth of experience in the areas of propositions, strategy development, consultancy, and brand management. A serial entrepreneur, Oleg has been described by clients as a “true creative visionary” and is particularly interested in the areas of health, civil rights and social action, human rights, economic empowerment, and education.

Oleg Fomenko gave a wide-ranging exclusive interview, which you can see below, and we are happy for you to use it for publication, provided there is a credit to www.cryptonews.com.

Highlights Of The Interview

• The founding story of Sweatcoin
• Sweat Economy’s DeFi structure; decentralized governance + tokenomics
• How Move-To-Earn can lower long-term health care costs
• Can Sweat Economy overcome the historical instability of the move-to-earn industry?
• Protecting data privacy in the fitness industry

           

Full Transcript Of The Interview

Matt Zahab
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Cryptonews Podcast. It’s your host, Matt Zahab. We are buzzing as always, coming in hot from Mexico. And I’m super pumped to have one of the OGs, not one of the OG of the move to earn industry on the show today, Oleg Fomenko, the Co-Founder of Sweat Economy, which is establishing the movement economy by realizing the value of physical activities and rewarding all forms of movement. Nine years prior to the conception of Sweat Economy, Oleg Co-Founded Sweatcoin, which we all know and love, a digital currency backed by physical movement with the Sweat Economy ecosystem. He has more than 15 years of experience as an entrepreneur. He founded bloom.fm and spearheaded a 16 million pound raise, attracting 1.2 million registered users in the UK and offering the world’s first one pound per month subscription service. Again, this is well ahead of the game. He also has a wealth of experience in the areas of propositions, strategy development, consultancy, brand management, you name it, a true serial entrepreneur and is incredibly interested in areas of health, civil rights, social actions, human rights, economic empowerment and education. I am super friggin pumped to have this guy on the show. Oleg, welcome to show my friend, pumped to have you on. How you doing?

Oleg Fomenko
Wow. Thank you very much, Matt. It’s an absolute pleasure being here. I can tell you PR agencies can certainly write some stuff. I’m like, holy moly, that’s me. Wow.

Matt Zahab
I love it. Yeah. I always. You gotta ask the PR firm to send over a fire bio, right? Cause I can go and I can do my research and look over, but 9 times out of 10, they’re gonna send me something better. But yeah, that was pretty darn good by them. But look man, super pumped to have you on. This is one of these episodes that has so much real world utility. And I’m very fortunate to have some incredible guests, not some, all of my guests that come on are absolutely incredible. People who are multitudes smarter than myself. And I get to learn from them. Most of the time though, it’s just in Web3. There’s very little application to the Web2 world or real world for that matter. We sort of live in this magic internet economy and you are spearheading the move to earn movement, which I absolutely love. I am a huge walker. I like to run, I love to walk. I think walking is one of the most unrated activities you can do on the planet. And to get paid to walk is absolutely brilliant. I can’t wait to get in this Sweat Economy. Before then though, we gotta set the stage. You gotta let our listeners know a little bit about who you are growing up. Tell us some good Russia stories. I don’t know if you’re a hockey fan at all. I live in bleed hockey. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen Putin play or Fedorov or any of those guys, but big hockey guy, tell us a little bit about yourself and some entrepreneurial stories. And then we’ll get into the Sweatcoin stuff.

Oleg Fomenko
I was born in Russia and yeah, as a Russian kid, I did play hockey. You had to, so the way it comes with it, with the territory, you gotta do cross-country skiing and playing hockey in winter and you walk and run in summer and play football. So, was huge fan of hockey, especially when Russia and Canada started going so really hard onto each other. Those games that were absolutely incredible. You know, kind of both from hockey perspective, but also on the, you know, kind of glove. Boxing perspective, it was, you know, absolutely superb time, very entertaining. But I did play very long time ago. 1995, I’ve already left Russia and has been living, you know, kind of all over the world ever since. I looked for the first time at Bitcoin in 2011 and absolutely loved it. But I was stupid enough not to actually buy a few thousand Bitcoin, they were 20 cents back then. Well, you know, there are plenty of stories. I’m sure circulating around, but I really got hooked on technology. And I really loved the fact that this was the first time that I touched technology that was so intricately linked with psychology. You know, I’ve never encountered this before because normally when you build tech, you always have to deal with all each cases and make sure that, you know, kind of nothing ever falls over. And here is the thing that basically says if more than 50% of participants are malicious, then the whole thing falls over. And I’m like, wow, that’s actually really cool because it brings psychology of large groups with tech and completely changes dynamics and sort of puts technology in a completely different role in the world.  Anyway, you know, enough philosophy. I really was very keen to figure out how to work with blockchain and, you know, kind of build around blockchain tech and opportunity presented itself in 2014 when I went for a run with my co-founder and I quit even around 5K. And three years before, I was climbing some of the highest mountains in the world. And we started talking, how is that possible? What’s going on? How do you lose fitness so quickly? And, you know, one thing after another, you know, sort of digging behavioral science and psychology, we realized that 100% of people in the world are frustrated with the level of physical activity. You know, they always want more. They want to be more active. They want to find more time. And when you encounter a problem that is so universal, there is a hint that there is an explanation there that might be a lot simpler than what’s on the surface. And on what’s on the surface, people complain about motivation, lack of money, lack of time, lack of, you know, kind of energy, you know, weather, you name it.

Matt Zahab
Lack of incentives.

Oleg Fomenko
You know, they suddenly complained about that. But what happens is that if you start digging this deep, you realize that the reason why we’re not as active as we want to be is very simple, because nature doesn’t want us to be active. Nature didn’t build us to be active. Nature built us and optimized us to survival, which means preservation of calories rather than spending on them. Right? So our ancestors wouldn’t run unless there is a mammoth on the horizon and there is food and you need to kill it so that the tribe has something to eat. Or Sabretooth tiger is about to make meal out of you. Otherwise you just sit and preserve those calories. Nobody would be doing pull-ups push-ups or training around and looking good. That would result in squandering of calories. And by the time mammoth shows up, everyone’s dead because they, you know, nature has really made it adamant that this is the way we should be behaving and it’s very hard to bite nature. However, nature also gave us a hint how to overcome this. And, you know, the shortcut or the solution is called instant gratification. So when we realize this, we kind of went, huh, so what if we create an instant gratification mechanism in exchange for every step that you take would that change people’s behavior? And this can be done with technology. So that’s how the ideas with Queen came about. We launched the app and we realized that it does subconsciously change people’s behavior. So it doesn’t make you go to gym more often. It doesn’t make you go for a run, but it makes you go for a little bit longer run. It makes you skip that stop on the bus. It makes you take a longer walk with your dog. It makes you take more steps on the daily basis because it is subconsciously starting to trigger those switches in the opposite direction. And nature tells you, well, it’s gainful activity. Therefore, you’re starting to change your behavior. Amazing result. We’ve done medical grade research in the UK with the University of Warwick and we learned that our users were 20% more active after installing our app than before. They loved proposition because, these guys do what they pay you to walk. It’s crazy that can’t work. So a lot of people were installing app just to prove that they must be doing something bad. They must be selling data. Yeah, important point we never did. We don’t do it and we never will sell data because we don’t have to and we believe that ethically it’s a wrong thing to do. And also legally we’re a European company and we are on the GDPR, which is the most draconian privacy protecting legal framework. So we are happy that we can’t and we don’t want to. But yeah, that’s a sort of side course. And then we just launched when you’re kind of into a lot of geographies and we started getting, you know, millions of users. Oh, important. Name, Sweat Queen, the original name. That suggests that we want to be on blockchain but we couldn’t. Bitcoin was too slow and too expensive to build on. Ethereum was too early. We met with Vitalic in 2015. It was just research grade project back then. And we had to launch centralized, but we thought that six months to a year there would be a great next blockchain coming in and we’ll just migrate very quickly. It took nearly nine years for blockchain tech to get robust enough and fast enough to support our scale. And we launched Sweat Economy last year on NEAR. I saw that, you know, you’re wearing a T-shirt. NEAR was sort of an amazing tech, really like founding team. And by then, we already had more than 120 million users, and it was too late to move the whole Sweatcoin ecosystem onto blockchain because imagine that over nine years, you already used to this thing behaving in a certain way, and you already build expectations. And we had to create a separate token, Sweat, and non-custodial wallet, Sweat wallets, and that went live last September in many geographies outside of the US. And we very quickly learned that US residents, US users of Sweatcoin, were not particularly happy about that decision. They made themselves known that, you know, why are we not able to walk into crypto? And the volume of these complaints was huge. And our community outside of the US was also very much supportive of going live in the US in the biggest ever governance vote in Web3’s history. 380 ,000 people cast their vote to go into the US and allocate a budget, which, you know, we did. So on 17th of October, or this is today, 19th, two days ago, we went live in the US, and we finally can say that, you know, pretty much 90% of the world countries now are both in Sweatcoin and in Sweat wallet, which means that you can literally walk into thrift shelf. I believe that you should be able to see that. So that’s basically the story.

Matt Zahab
What a start, Oleg. That was absolute fuego. That was nothing but fire. So many different ways we can take this. Let’s just keep going on cron order here. You just brought it up going into the US. That’s absolutely massive. It’s the most powerful economy in the world. For a good reason, the US is going to US. You know what they do. I could be wrong here, but I believe the Ripple ruling had a massive emphasis, a huge emphasis in your guys’ ability to participate in the US. Why did it take so long? Why was it such a shit show? Obviously, everyone knows that they are the kings and queens of putting up walls and borders everywhere except from Mexico to US. But everywhere when it comes to anything tech related, they love putting forks in the fire and turning it into a shit show. And that obviously impacted you guys as well. Talk to me about the Ripple ruling and how that allowed you guys to jump into the US market.

Oleg Fomenko
Yeah, I wouldn’t say that it was the main reason. The main reason was use a base of Sweatcoin users that were demanding that they should be able to walk into crypto. And our worldwide community understanding very well that actually growing the community and becoming bigger is beneficial for everybody. I would say that XRP ruling was sort of one of those solidifying moments where you all of a sudden need realize that, you know what the time has come that we know that it will happen, but that sort of precipitated their decision because we realized, and it is extremely important to emphasize this, that the reason why regulations exist in the US is to protect American investors from rugs, ivory, whatever. And we realized that we as a project, we’re coming with a completely different sort of goal objective sentiment and also history because unlike a lot of other crypto projects, we’ve been around for nine years. We already know what we’re doing and we have a Web2 business in the US. And our objective is to make the world more physically active. And we do it extremely well. And we know that by extending the business into Web3 we bring in more behavior change, we’re shaving more inches of that proverbial waste of a nation. And let’s face it, the United States is not the leanest and the thinnest population in the world. And yeah, to be honest, it’s everywhere right now, but we do need to have every single bit of help to be more physically active, earn more calories and can it be in a better shape that we can get? So we are coming with that in mind and we cannot even physically cause damages to American investors because they earn our token by walking and burning calories. So when you realize this, kind of while risks always exist, I think it would be very strange if we were sort of singled out as a project that is actually kind of causing damage and is doing stuff that needs to be stopped. So we thought about it and which kind of went, okay, you know what? We can’t really continue collecting such a huge user base that we already have. And frankly, I got tired of trying to explain to people why they are not treated like everybody else. And frankly, personally, you know this, like if you are getting worse deal than others, it’s unpleasant. I don’t wanna be that person. Absolutely, and I feel that it’s just so unfair on US residents that this was going on. So we just needed to fix it. And it’s literally massive sort of holder off my shoulders that we are now there, that anyone who wants to literally walk into crypto can do it. But actually I would like to take a step aside from kind of XRP and tell you that once we started doing the research into crypto and our proposition, we realized that there are two reasons why mass market audience is struggling to engage. And that’s the reason why Web3 is not growing as fast as I believe it should have been over the last few years. And the reasons are user experience and language. So we’re so used and I’m sure that you know your crypto. This 24 words that we need to write down and then there’s a big text. Don’t even take a screenshot. And so people are really kind of feeling like, oh my God, this is too complicated and it’s too wondrous or it’s too scary. And there’s also language, you know, huddle, biddle, finality and all that, you know, staking people just kind of go like, you know, I don’t understand. I read the sentence, I read words, but I don’t know the meaning that is really emanating. And we’ve taken that on board. And over the last many years, we learned how to build really slick, simple, you know, very straightforward applications that just work, Sweatcoin. We took that experience and we built really cool app, Sweat Wallet. If you go into App Store right now, you’ll see that we have a rating of 4.8 with tens of thousands of ratings. So, you know, can be really good app. And the other thing that people always were citing as a barriers and issue was even if you must have that opsec and you went in, the first step that you’d always have to take is buy some crypto. And that means you pull your card and you have to buy some, but typically it doesn’t make sense to buy less than a few hundred dollars worth. And all of a sudden you kind of go, ooh, you know, yesterday they wrote about 600 million being drained from here, 320 million being drained from there. People kind of go like, oh my God, no way, my lot. It’s going to be my money that’s going to disappear. And they bulk and they take a step back and they kind of go, you know, I don’t want to risk that much cash. They literally want to get in there, learn the ropes and understand how it works. And then they can participate. And this is exactly our proposition, walk into crypto. You move your legs, you earn your tokens. Is it going to make your, you know, kind of crazy rich and you know, you’re going to be able to stop working? No, we never promised that, unlike some other projects that, you know, kind of were making crazy claims. But you can actually learn crypto tokens and you can learn ropes. You can understand how to transfer, how to receive, you can understand how to state. You can understand how Web3 gaming works. You can understand how trading for other crypto token works. And all of a sudden you’re going to go, oh my God, this, you know, I am using Web3. I am in it. I’m experiencing this. And all of a sudden you can start engaging with other protocols, other chains and potentially putting in your money because you are no noob anymore and you feel a lot more confident. That’s basically what we do. Make you walk more and be seated and healthier while learning the ropes and understanding how Web3 works. So health and wealth go well together.

Matt Zahab
100% health, wealth, and happiness. That’s my motto. Oleg, like you are absolutely on fire and we got to give a huge shout out to our sponsor to the show, PrimeXBT. And when we get back, we are going to get into the move to earn industry and how Sweat Economy will overcome the classic inability of the move to earn coins, companies, and projects, their ability to succeed. So far we haven’t seen any, but if I’m a betting man and I am a betting man, it’s gonna be you guys. But until then, huge shout out to PrimeXBT, the longtime friends of the Cryptonews Podcast and longtime sponsors of the Cryptonews Pod. Of course, we love these guys as they offer a robust trading system for both beginners and professional traders. It doesn’t matter if you’re a rookie or a vet, you can easily design and customize your layouts and widgets to best fit your trading style. PrimeXBT is also running an exclusive promotion for listeners of the Cryptonews Podcast. You can use the promo code CRYPTONEWS50, that’s CRYPTONEWS50, all one word to receive 50% of your deposit credited to your trading account. Again, that is CRYPTONEWS50 to receive 50% of your deposit credited to your trading account. Now back to the show with Oleg. Let’s get into the elephant in the room here. I’ve told my friends about Sweatcoin, I told my friends about Steppen. I was on Steppen, many of us were on Steppen. Again, the only similarity you guys have is that you’re both in the move to earn game. Well, I mean, they’re not really around anymore, but they were in the move to earn game. You guys literally are the move to earn game. You guys pioneered this shit. What everyone always asks me when I tell them about this, they always go, Matt, tell me about some cool DeFi applications. Tell me about some cool things in crypto. And I bring up things like, hey, a couple of weeks ago, I had a buddy who reached out, talking crypto, do you have any cool podcast guests coming up? And I’m like, well, if I tell him about DeFi Company One or ZK Tech Company Y, he doesn’t give a shit. But I was like, yeah, you know what? Actually, this super cool dude Oleg’s coming on. He’s the Founder and CEO of this company called Sweat Economy. And you’re a big walker. You love running. You run marathons. You literally get paid to run and walk. It’s pretty sweet. He goes, how does he pay me? Where does the money come from? So I’m going to throw it over to you because I’m sure this is not, I’m sure. This is the elephant in the room. Everyone wants to know, how does this whole economy work? On the outside looking in, it’s quite simple. People take their left leg, they put it in front of the right leg, and they get paid. And like you said, it’s not going to make you rich. Even if you’re running a marathon a day, you’re not going to be able to retire. But it’s not about that. It’s about giving you a very small piece of the pie. And in return, you get to participate in a really cool economy, get a little bit healthier, a little bit wealthier, and learn about Web3, learn about crypto. It’s wins, wins across the board. But I want to throw the ball over to your court. Tell me how the economy actually works. Where’s the money that you guys give? Where does that come from? Give me the whole nine yards here.

Oleg Fomenko
There is a lot to unpack there. But you know where I’ll start? I’ll start with three steps back, because it’s always useful when there is an analogy, something that brings stuff to life, right? And there is an economy that is sort of XX to earn that has been, well, actually, there are two. There is one that has been going for thousands of years, and we’re so used to it, we don’t even think about it in the concept of XX to earn. And then there is one that was built by humanity over the course of the last hundred and fifty years to humongous size. The first one is work to earn, right? I mean, we all understand the concept and, you know, we’re all in it. The other one, the next one is pay attention to earn, or in other words, we call this attention economy. By some estimate, it is an industry of seven trillion dollars in size. Now, let’s unpack how does it work? I pay attention. A company gets the value of that attention that the third party advertiser pays them. And then that company gives them a sliver of that value in the shape of three products. And, you know, this product is making me spend more and more attention so that the company makes more money. And that’s how we have attention economy generating this big tech. And the reason why they’re so wealthy, this company, is because they’re giving us tiny little sliver of that value that they receive for your attention. Now, let’s unpack parallels between attention and physical activity. Both are useful and essential to you. Every bit of knowledge, every meeting of a person, every new transaction, or anything starts with you paying attention. That’s the value and the utility that you get. Physical activity, you are the primary beneficiary of physical activity, keeps you in a better physical shape. It helps you to stay in a mental health shape as well. It lengthens your life. It extends your health span. And it also makes you happier, reduces absenteeism, increases productivity. So, you know, it’s amazingly valuable to you. There are also third parties, like advertisers, in case of attention, that are willing to pay for your physical activity. Healthcare providers, insurers, employers, ultimately countries, because if you’re physically active, you put less pressure on healthcare costs. And you live longer, therefore you generate more tax revenue all the time. So, it is big business. And what matters most is both attention and physical activity, us cars, that are unlimited. You know, you can’t have an unlimited amount of attention and you can’t have an unlimited amount of physical activity. So, why would we not have a movement economy or physical activity economy very much akin to attention economy? Especially if we have this new blockchain technology where we can tokenize and actually turn, track and verify physical activity into a token that you earn, as opposed to mean getting all the value and giving you a tiny sliver of it in the shape of three products. This value exchange is going to make you go like, wow, okay, now I’m earning from my physical activity, makes you even more physically active, that creates more wealth in the world that again you earn. And that pushes us to create quite a lot of wealth because, you know, I already mentioned, there are a lot of entities that are benefiting from increasing the amount of physical activity in the world. In the US, average person walks 3,000 steps a day. That’s more than three times less than what, I mean, we have this data. In Europe, it’s 5,000, so we’re a million miles away from getting even 10,000 that is recommended, you know, on a daily basis. So, we can create an immense amount of wealth. And our thesis is, if attention is $7 trillion, seven times the total size of crypto, I bet you that movement economy will be bigger in size because it’s healthcare cost reduction, productivity increase, absolutely decrease, health span increase, higher amount of economic activity, etc. And why would it be less than $70 trillion? I don’t know the time horizon, but with the advent of technology, it’s certainly not going to take us 150 years to build this thing.

Matt Zahab
Me playing devil’s advocate here, or like my only point in being the devil here would be the barrier to entry and the friction, right? Where it’s like for me to, for the movement economy to not be as big as the attention economy. Cause for the attention economy, I just pick up my phone and boom, I’m participating. But for the movement economy, actually I need to get my ass out of the chair and move. That’s my only thing. I do agree with you. It can be just as big, but that’s my only downfall.

Oleg Fomenko
But everyone is moving already. It’s not that you need to fundamentally change your life. That’s what I started with, you know, and the nature plays districts on us. Everyone takes steps per day. You are not fundamentally doing anything different. You are just extending the period in which you are physically active. That is extremely easy to do. I’m not telling you you need to start going to your gym. That is a radical change. What we are telling you is every step is worth something. And all of a sudden, miraculously, you start putting one foot in front of another more times per day. That’s all we want. And the barrier to entry, the app is free. It does not consume your battery and you are getting paid to walk. Now, after we finish sort of this, you know, we are working on this analogy, which paints a very different picture from what a lot of people think about need to earn. We are building moving into Convay. We are creating sweat as a tokenized physical activity. In the future, I don’t want people to talk about, you know, sweat has increased price, decreased price. I’d like to have a headline that says, physical activity pumped 20% last week on the release of the recent obesity data. That’s the stuff that we are going for because physical activity has value. Everyone knows when we say that, but when you ask how much, everyone just kind of goes, but if something has value, it has to have tangible financial value. Let’s create it, let’s make it tradable and let’s figure out how much humanity is willing to pay for physical activity. They in and out very much like attention because we now know how much attention is worth. Let’s arrive to that answer in Movement Economy. Now, where does money come from? Very simple answer. Your moving has value and your attention as a physical person has incredible value as well. If you health, fitness, sports, vanity, fashion, makeup, dog accessories, healthy feed supplements, brands, talking to physically active people is fishing in the pond where you know all your users are because their mindset is already in the right direction. And you can target them extremely precisely. If you wanna target people who just started the journey, you put low price and all of a sudden you have tens of millions of people that can afford the product. If you wanna target people like yourselves, the athletes, you put high price and not many people will have those balances. So all of a sudden, you are dealing with the audience that you know is right customer, you can precisely target them and you also give them these products in a very different environment where they’re gagging, they’re interested in spending and getting your product as opposed to being interrupted with some advertising where they go, you know what, I was trying to chat to Matt and this video popped up and you know, again, it interrupted me, right? It’s a completely different mindset. So we are, you know, kind of, we, over the last nine years, nine years ago when I was telling the story, people were like, huh? What the hell are you talking about? This is a charity. You’re planning to pay people to walk. What kind of business is that? Right? Right now, especially after multiple years of us not just being sustainable and not just being growing but also being profitable, people are starting to get onto this. I’m like, oh yeah, I can understand how this works. So third parties are paying a lot of money to get in front of you and engage with you as a user. There are also third parties that are paying for your physical activity. We have a big contract in the United Kingdom with National Health Service and HHS to make people diagnosed with diabetes syndrome more active. If you diagnose with diabetes syndrome, you have six months within which you have to change your diet and your lifestyle. To change diet is easy, lifestyle is hard. That’s where we come in. The adherence in the previous program was 26%. It is in excess of 80% with our participation. And if you can stop people from becoming diabetic, you make them live longer, you grow quality of life because they don’t have to deal with insulin and constant checks. It’s absolutely incredible. And live along the huge cost that society bears by having another person who’s got serious medical condition and needs constant attention and support. So it’s there. It’s happening. Everyone understands that pieces are starting to fall into place, but we can shave. I believe factor 10 in terms of trying to create the economy in comparison to attention economy by having blockchain because we can talk about physical activity. We can turn it into liquid asset. We can make it easily exchangeable from one party to another and tradeable independently without any party is able to influence.

Matt Zahab
I love that. The reason why I have to play devil’s advocate and be the devil in the room here is because again, when people hear such an incredible value proposition like Sweatcoins, they are going to say and Sweat Economies. They’re going to say it sounds too good to be true. The only other thing we need to touch on is the data privacy, more specifically data privacy in the fitness industry. And when I’ve been asked about Sweatcoin and Sweat Economy in particular, your singular data, your own data is not being sold to anyone. When someone like NHS in Britain partners with you guys, they’re getting the data set as a whole. They are not getting anyone’s individual data. I’d love if you could just speak upon data privacy in the fitness industry as a whole and how you guys are protecting your users’ data.

Oleg Fomenko
So as I said, we never transferred or sold data. We don’t transfer or sell data now and we never will. And we’ve been asked plenty of times, especially insurance companies, that really wanted for their models. But you know what? Genuinely it feels like shooting out, if we were to consider this, that would be like shooting ourselves in the foot. Our objective is to make the world more physically active. And for that we need trust of hundreds of millions, billions of people. And selling data is, it feels like a dirty trick. It should not be practiced by any business. And it just really enrages me when I hear that businesses even got hacked and they were not taking care of the data enough so that my data got stolen. Leave along when they were willingly transferring it. And as I mentioned, this is one of the reasons why we keep all the data in Europe. Because that means that it is governed by the GPR framework. And we legally, even if anybody in the business were to consider it, legally we just wouldn’t be able to do any of this shit. So this never happened. And the reason for it is because, as I mentioned, we have really robust business models. Businesses pay to us, advertisers pay to us. And we also have premium subscription. And these three revenue streams work really well in Web2. In Web3 we have additional revenue streams because all of a sudden you have your own asset where you can charge your keys for transferring stuff. And in charge of trading, our Sweat hero game is also generating revenues for us. You know, it’s a battle and company charges battle fee. And this is not going into our pocket. This is going into a revenue pot. And if this revenue is in Sweat, the community votes on what to do with it. And historically they’ve been voting to burn it. So remove it from circulating supply. If this revenue is in other tokens in Fiat, we spend half of our profit on buying tokens on an open market. So this money effectively goes back to token holders. Web3 is incredibly flexible and very innovative space that represents more revenue opportunities than even Web2. Which is why from July this year we managed to become deflationary. As I mentioned, this nine years we’ve been spending, you know, kind of not just learning the ropes of move to earn. We also built sustainable businesses that were scaling and that were profitable. We took this into Web3 and profitability in Web3 is deflationary nature of your token economics. What does it mean? At the end of the month, our circulating supply of tokens is lower than at the end of the previous month. So that’s what we were able to achieve. And the reason for it is the fact that we’re paying a lot of attention to token economics, to token things, to revenue generation and making sure that we are not just telling you story, but we’re really focusing on building robust business and value for token holders.

Matt Zahab
Oleg you’ve been on fire today mate. I’m having too much fun here. I absolutely love this. One last topic, because I think we’ve covered almost everything here, just as sort of the gamification of the fitness industry as a whole. One thing that genuinely, I don’t want to say grinds my gears, that pisses me off a little, I have an Apple Watch. Is it a Rolex? Is it a Audemars Piguet? Is it a Patek Philippe? No, it’s not. But you know what? The reason why I like my Apple Watch is it gamifies health. I’m a very active guy. I’m fortunate to be in pretty good shape. I owe part of that to my parents who were very, who put such an emphasis on always being active and moving. When I was young, they put me in a bunch of sports. They gave me the opportunity to become a, you know, a physically fit human being. The reason why I have this Apple Watch on right now is it makes things fun, you know? It’s like, oh, if my ass is in the chair for 50 minutes on the hour, like it is right now in one minute, you know, we’re at the 50 minute mark right now. I’m going to get a little notification. Hey, time to get up. It’s just good little things like that. On the flip side, you have people going, what kind of human are you if you need a piece of technology to motivate you? It’s like, look, I would still get 20,000 steps a day. I would still be an absolute specimen without the Apple Watch, but it makes it fun for me. It makes it more interesting. It makes it cool. And it turns it into a game. Life’s a big, darn game. And if you can create many games out of life, you’re on the road to success. What do you have to say to the haters out there who are like, ah, who needs a friggin app in order to motivate them? Because for me, it’s a big old FU. I think it’s, I love it. I’m all for it. I’m all for health tech. And I think it’s going to really help us become a fitter, healthier, happier and wealthier society.

Oleg Fomenko
Hmm. It’s a big topic for me. I was planning to have a TEDx talk on the topic of manipulation, because what you are talking about is, is it okay to manipulate somebody? And for quite a lot of people, they feel that unless it my sort of intrinsic drives and it somehow came out of me, it is unacceptable. You know, when my watch tells me to stand up, or when somebody tells you to do something, then it’s sort of an oppression and it’s manipulation, or it’s somebody else trying to change my behavior.

Matt Zahab
What about the intent? If the intention is good, who gives a shit? You know what I mean? This thing is here to make me fitter. Who cares. You know what I mean?

Oleg Fomenko
Exactly. Now, that is precisely the talk, you know, kind of the story of my talk because my first ever memory is I am two and a half years of age and I see these spaces. One of them is my mom. Another one is highly concerned looking doctor that, you know, kind of somehow persuades me to swallow this liquid because it was very sweet. And apparently I told this to my mom and she said, oh, yeah, no, that was, you know, you had a temperature and they called it you were dead and you needed to get humongous quantity of this. I don’t remember the temperature dropping paracetamol, but you know, kind of version of paracetamol. And, you know, kind of in order to persuade me to do it, they put it into honey. So they tricked me by giving me something sweet and I swallowed it. And you know what? I lived because of that. Now, I have absolutely no problem with somebody manipulating or telling me to do something because it is exactly about that. It is intent. It’s not the action. But what does it do to me? And with what intent it is given to me? So if people are complaining that, you know, and they don’t want to use an app, God bless them. I mean, if they can find the discipline that, you know, kind of that great memory to every 60 minutes to jump up and move, who does to them and respect to them. And yep, but majority of us have a lot of other things to worry about. So if somebody nudges me and tells me to do something, I’m just thankful that I can actually delegate this means field task that I don’t want to use my brain for to technology. But I am still benefiting from those behaviors that are coming from those nudges. So if people don’t want to play the game, absolutely fine. You know, kind of, to be honest, it’s not like, you know, we’re selling you a really expensive NFT at the door and we’re dependent on you coming in and buying them. And that’s my revenue stream. No, as I said, everything’s free. The app is free. And everything works because of the scale and because you change your behavior. And there are a lot of companies are paying attention to that. I’m kind of going, these guys are able to make these people more active. I want to talk to them. And I want to attract their attention. And I want to have them as customers. So if you don’t want to participate in it, I mean.

Matt Zahab
Love it. Oleg what an episode, man. This has been an absolute treat. I’ve had a blast and can’t wait to have you on for round two. I also need some of that Sweat swag. It is nasty. I love that. I’ll be rocking that. Just like I’m rocking the NEAR swag. I’ll be rocking some of the Sweat swag. But until the next time we speak, you got to let our listeners know where they can find you and Sweatcoin and Sweat Economy online and on socials.

Oleg Fomenko
So open your iPhone or Android open apps or Google Play and just type Sweat. The top is going to be a Sweat when we have nearly 200 million installs. We deserve that top spot. Install the app and if you want to play crypto game then on the main screen just see a banner that says walk into crypto, follow prompts and you will end up having your crypto account and you will install Sweat wallet that will effectively manage your Sweat. That’s it. On Telegram we are @SweatEconomy. On Twitter we are @SweatEconomy. On Discord we are Sweat Economy. Very simple of sweateconomy.com and you can find light paper and all the links to all the socials right there. And if you go into any of those channels and you want to chat to me you’ll find me there very easy. I’m active in all of those conversations. You can tag me and I cannot promise that I do things quickly but generally once every 24-48 hours I go in and I answer all the questions and address every comment.

Matt Zahab
And guys, if you want to follow Oleg on Twitter, his account is @oleg_efm. Oleg, what an episode. Such a treat. Thank you so much for coming on, man, and can’t wait for round two.

Oleg Fomenko
Fantastic. Matt, thank you very much for having me.

Matt Zahab
Folks, what an episode with Oleg Fomenko, the Co-Founder of Sweat Economy, the OG move to earn app. Guys do go check it out. Again, we are talking about literally getting a little bit healthier, a little bit happier, and a little bit wealthier all at the same time. Go to the app store on your phone and check out Sweat Economy. Huge shout out to the team for making this happen. Listeners, love you guys. If you enjoyed this one and I hope you did, please do subscribe. It would mean the world to my team and I. Speaking of the team, love you guys so much. Thank you for everything. Especially Justas you are the GOAT, the most GOATy sound editor of all time. You’re the man. Appreciate you and love you and back to the listeners. Love you guys. Thank you so much for everything. Keep on growing those bags and keep on staying healthy, wealthy and happy. Bye for now and we’ll talk soon.