Sweatcoin pays people to walk. Co-founder Oleg Fomenko on where the money comes from when your product pays the customer.

Recorded in January 2026.

Every fitness business charges for activity. Membership, trainer, kit. Oleg Fomenko built the reverse, and he tells Natalia Karbasova that early investors called it a charity and asked where the business was.

Fomenko is co-founder of Sweatcoin and now leads Sweat Foundation, the business behind the Sweat token and Sweat Wallet. He spent most of a decade on Sweatcoin before moving across, and the two companies exist separately for reasons he explains in the episode.

In this conversation:

- Where the revenue sits when the product pays the customer instead of charging them

- What a brand is actually buying when it pays to be a partner

- Why these users are the mirror image of Strava's, and who they are

- Why a failed Bitcoin fork produced two separate companies

- What it takes to put a cash number on an active day

Links:

• Oleg Fomenko on LinkedIn

• Sweatcoin
• Natalia Karbasova on LinkedIn
• Tomorrow Health
• Apply to join FitTech Club

Chapters:

00:00 Why movement should be a trillion-dollar market

00:29 Sweatcoin, and why it pays you to walk

01:40 From 100 million to 200 million

02:54 How it actually works

05:06 Cashing out, and what a token is worth

06:20 Why these are not Strava users

09:45 Where the money comes from

10:56 What a partner is paying for

13:01 Why there are two companies

14:45 The premium subscription

15:50 Putting a price on an active day

19:11 What operators can do with this

20:53 What the industry gets wrong

21:39 Where to find Tomorrow Health

All figures in this episode are Oleg Fomenko's own disclosures at the time of recording.