Buoyed by XRP court ruling, Sweat Economy goes live in the US

The app will let US users earn tokens by walking and trade them on centralized exchanges

article-image

dennizn/Shutterstock modified by Blockworks

share

The move-to-earn company behind Sweatcoin is bringing its Sweat Wallet on-chain in the US.

American Sweatcoin users are now able to move their SWEAT tokens into the Sweat Wallet app and trade the currency on secondary markets. Sweat Economy’s co-founder said the move came after the company’s legal advisors said SWEAT is safe from being labeled as a security by US regulators.

Sweatcoin takes phone data to count users’ steps, allowing every 1000 steps to be redeemed for one SWEAT. The tokens are currently worth around a cent and are tradeable on Bybit, KuCoin, and OKX, among other exchanges. Users can also earn SWEAT by playing Sweatcoin’s NFT game and staking their SWEAT in “Growth Jars.”

Sweatcoin was founded in 2014 but didn’t go on-chain until last year, when the company, now called Sweat Economy, launched its SWEAT token on the NEAR protocol. The 2022 launch didn’t bring SWEAT to America, however. 

This was because “paranoid” lawyers advised the company against ongoing uncertainty about the legal status of crypto in the US, according to Oleg Fomenko, the Sweat Foundation’s co-founder.

But after Ripple scored a partial court win in its long-running legal fight with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, the company and its lawyers became “100%” certain that SWEAT is not a security. 

A federal court ruled in July that while Ripple’s [XRP] sales to institutions constituted securities offerings, its programmatic sales did not. The case is ongoing. 

Move-to-earn apps have caught flack in the past for their allegedly unsustainable economic models, but Fomenko said that Sweat’s economic structure isn’t based on “ponzinomics.” Sweat, Fomenko argued, spent eight years building out its business before creating a token.

At the time of writing, Sweat Wallet is the #8 financial app on the app store

The US “needs this,” Fomenko added. “Because let’s face it: we [don’t have] an extremely fit population.”


Get the news in your inbox. Explore Blockworks newsletters:

Tags

Upcoming Events

Old Billingsgate

Mon - Wed, October 13 - 15, 2025

Blockworks’ Digital Asset Summit (DAS) will feature conversations between the builders, allocators, and legislators who will shape the trajectory of the digital asset ecosystem in the US and abroad.

Industry City | Brooklyn, NY

TUES - THURS, JUNE 24 - 26, 2025

Permissionless IV serves as the definitive gathering for crypto’s technical founders, developers, and builders to come together and create the future.If you’re ready to shape the future of crypto, Permissionless IV is where it happens.

Brooklyn, NY

SUN - MON, JUN. 22 - 23, 2025

Blockworks and Cracked Labs are teaming up for the third installment of the Permissionless Hackathon, happening June 22–23, 2025 in Brooklyn, NY. This is a 36-hour IRL builder sprint where developers, designers, and creatives ship real projects solving real problems across […]

recent research

Unlocked by Template (7).png

Research

Union’s improvements upon Tendermint consensus through CometBLS, coupled with ZK proving through Galois, allow for a broadly scalable, cost efficient, and low latency IBC implementation that is feasibly scalable across every existing blockchain, virtual machine and runtime. The implementation offers modular crosschain interoperability without the need for trusted intermediaries.  

article-image

Kraken’s chief security officer Nick Percoco said the exchange turned the tables on a North Korean hacker

article-image

Or is it approximately the least cypherpunk thing we could do?

article-image

Over 20% of SOL-USD swap volume goes through SolFi

article-image

CEO Vlad Tenev calls expected clarity on listing crypto asset securities “a big opportunity”

article-image

Big Tech pulled US indexes back into the green Thursday, as investors waited for two more Mag 7 first-quarter reports after the bell

article-image

Charts and takeaways from Tuesday’s jobs report and Wednesday’s GDP print, as the economy digests the tariff war