Unusual Crypto Adoption: Stay Healthy or Lose Your Ether

You’re out of shape, you say? You want to keep your crypto with you, you say? You need something to keep you motivated to exercise? Have we just found a 3-in-1 solution? Well, not we exactly – entrepreneur Amr Saleh has put together a bunch of parts into a punching bag that serves as a proof-of-concept. The motivation part comes into play when you realize that if you don’t finish your work out, you don’t get your money.

“I find it hard to commit to going to the gym with my busy schedule. I got a punching bag at home and I still struggle with committing to my workout. Knowing the rule of loss aversion, and that losing money hurts more than gaining muscle feels good I thought, why not add a financial motive to help me stick to my exercise plan”, writes Saleh in a blog post.

How does it work? First, the user locks up a certain amount of ether, native token of the Ethereum blockchain, into a 64-line smart contract. In this specific case, the condition is the set number of punches on the bag, and the self-executing code will release your ether only when you have completed the workout.

What happens if you fail? Well, hopefully, you’ll be incentivized enough not to, but if it does happen, the smart contract will send your funds to your chosen Ethereum wallet (preferably, someone else’s, not yours).

The 59-seconds YouTube video posted this week, shows the punching bag and its parts. There is an accelerometer sensor that counts the punches, which is connected to a prototype Elk’s blockchain development board. This board is the property of a startup that Saleh co-founded, called Elk. There is also a convenient lightbulb to notify the increasingly healthier crypto enthusiast that they have finished their promised routine and can collect their earnings and rest.

Saleh writes that he got the idea an Ethereum-IoT hackathon in Berlin, and he created his bag once he returned to Cairo. “I wanted to challenge myself so I locked a USD 100 worth of ether in a smart contract and committed to 500 punches a day for 10 days. If I finish my workout on schedule, I get my money back, and if I don’t, the money goes to charity”, he says.

Saleh also announced that Elk will be launched on Kickstarter, a crowdfunding platform, next month.