Right now, Sweatcoin's algorithm verifies about 65% of our users' total steps on average. We are working hard to increase this % over time as we improve our algorithm.
The algorithm is in place to ensure that all Sweatcoins are earned through hard work and movement. If it wasn’t this way, users could potentially cheat the system by doing things like shaking their phone or using the app in a car etc.
Our algorithm analyses steps collected directly by your phone and checks them against other data points like GPS location, speed, and consistency of movement.
Although it does much more, the algorithm performs the following critical checks:
- Is any vital data missing (e.g. your GPS location is missing) - if yes then steps are not counted (so please be sure that you have a GPS signal)
- Does data from the different sources match (e.g. you moved 10 miles, but your phone reported 2 steps - it's likely you’re in a moving vehicle) if no then the steps are not counted
- Does your data match a known pattern of cheating (e.g. shaking the phone up and down to mimic steps) - if yes (and we manually check this) steps won’t be counted