Last Sunday, more than 15,000 runners made their way through the streets of Lithuania’s capital city on their way to finishing the Vilnius Marathon and its accompanying races. Four thousand of those runners were using Lympo Run to track their race, which rewarded them in cryptocurrency for hitting their fitness goals.

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Lympo, the Lithuanian outfit behind the app, partnered directly with the marathon, sponsoring the event and making the new program available on Lithuanian app stores for participants, where it promptly shot to the top of the charts. The company was thrilled with the digital turnout.

“It was incredibly inspiring to finally see people enjoying the app and actually getting rewards for completing challenges,” said Lympo founder and CEO Ada Jonuse on the company’s Medium page. “We still have so much ahead of us, but this was truly a beautiful start and a major milestone in Lympo’s journey.”

Lympo’s marathon-coordinated app launch was its second big push toward widespread name recognition after the Lympo Challenge this summer. The social media-based challenge was small-scale, rewarding around 300 participants for uploading tweets or Instagram posts showing their progress toward a stated fitness goal in return for LYM tokens, Lympo’s blockchain currency.

While the inner workings of cryptocurrency markets are a bit complex, the general concept of what Lympo is doing goes like this: The company has created what it calls an “ecosystem” powered by three parts. First, average users track their workouts on the app and receive LYM tokens as rewards. Users can then use these tokens to purchase goods and services in the Lympo marketplace. To build on that, Lympo has more abstract aspirations of harnessing participation to grow related services and streamline the world of health data.

The model is reminiscent of several other ambitious startups—such as SweatCoin, Fitcoin, and FitBlox—already in existence that want to merge the worlds of fitness tracking and cryptocurrency. All these companies offer a sweet tagline, promising to pay you for working out, but differ widely in their efficiency, reliability, and popularity.

These enterprises have in turn built on the innovation of other services that use crypto. Crumbs invests your spare change in cryptocurrencies like Acorns does with stocks. And Lolli rewards users with the crypto equivalent of cash back for online purchases at participating retailers.

Like any crypto-related endeavor, Lympo still has a lot to prove, but it’s the first of its kind to partner with a well-respected race, an innovative approach. Whatever its future, Lympo arrives in both the United States and China later this year, so users around the globe will be able to evaluate for themselves.

Jacob Meschke Contributing Writer Jacob joined Runner’s World and Bicycling as an editorial fellow after graduating from Northwestern University in 2018, where he studied journalism.

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