Stephanie Douse 
Stepn is also working to make its platform less accessible to people in mainland China. This is in addition to its efforts to stop cheating and bots.
Solana-based move-to-earn application Stepn has reported multiple denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks following the platform’s major anti-cheating upgrade.
On June 5, Stepn took to Twitter to report that the platform had been subjected to several DDoS attacks, resulting in recovery maintenance and poor performance.
Stepn had expected to secure and recover the servers in up to 12 hours, according to the statement, but had not posted an update in 20 hours at the time of writing.
“Our engineers are working tirelessly to resolve the issues. We will post an update here once the recovery is complete. “I appreciate everyone’s patience,” Stepn wrote.
The attacks occurred shortly after Stepn launched its anti-cheating system, dubbed “Stepn’s Model for Anti-Cheating,” or SMAC, on June 3. The system aims to remove fake users from the platform as well as to prevent fraudulent motion data on the Stepn app to gain an unfair profit from the platform.
“Our machine learning algorithm specifically targets movement simulation by amending real walking/running data,” the anti-cheating system’s description reads.
Stepn reported major platform issues shortly after proceeding with the upgrade, with SMAC incorrectly identifying some legitimate users as bots. Other issues included network issues caused by a “25 million DDOS attack,” as well as the inability to track any bots on the platform for a short period.
“We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this has caused users.” The anti-cheating update may appear minor, but it is a critical component of Stepn’s long-term development,” Stepn explained.
Despite the platform’s DDoS issues, Stepn’s native token, the Green Satoshi Token (GST), has not experienced a significant drop in value in recent days. On the contrary, the GST is up around 10% in the last 24 hours and is currently trading at $1.04 at the time of writing. According to CoinGecko data, the token’s market capitalization is $624 million.
Stepn is a major move-to-earn mobile nonfungible token (NFT) game that will be released in December 2021, allowing users to earn tokens by walking, jogging, or running outdoors with an NFT sneaker. The GST token and the Governance Token are used in the game’s dual token system.
The announcement comes as Stepn prepares to limit the platform’s availability to mainland Chinese users by mid-July.