Step Finance Update #1
Its been an exciting few months at Step we have launched so many new and features to the platform in addition to one of the most successful Solana token launches so far (26k active participants, #1 liquidity pool for the last 2 months) and this is just the beginning. In todays update we want to talk a bit about where things are at now post launch and what we are building into the mid term.
A Growing Team:
We have recently onboarded 2 new full-time developers to the Step team who have been assisting with the development and rollout of all our new features including the recent integrations with: Star Atlas, Solarians, Orca, Solpunk, Raydium, Mango and more. We are now on a very good cadence of major releases every 2 weeks or so. Welcome to Ed and Peter!
Growing Coverage Across Solana
We have integrated the following projects lately on Step: Mango, Orca, Serum (AMM), Serum (DEX), Raydium, Solpunks, Solarians, Star Atlas, Stableswap and the list keeps growing. The thing with coverage is its never a solved problem, there will always be new things launching and our intent here is to ensure we have adequate coverage of the top projects relevant to our users demands. Which is also why we recently launched the ‘Suggestions’ page to prioritise the most demanded features, try it out! We have chat groups for integration with most of the projects on Solana and we are also working on various interesting partnerships integrating STEP or Step Finance into our partners services and products, this will become clearer over the coming weeks.
Step Token Launch
Step token launch went off with a bang and we are very pleased with how things went. It is now traded across 3 centralised exchanges with spot and futures order books in addition to the highly liquid Solana DEX. We also have our Raydium Fusion pool which has been a staple in farming on Solana since launch. We also recently deployed our DEX Aggregation for Swaps with all fees going towards buybacks of the STEP token from circulating supply. Over time we will be rolling out new value adding services which may charge a fee which will find its way back to STEP stakers by way of a buyback from the open markets. You can learn more about our value accrual options here
The First Big Update
Our first big update came the other day by virtue of our integration of our DEX Swap aggregator (and many other additions) which routes swaps via the Serum DEX- the most liquid market on Solana, in addition to our existing AMM pool connections to Orca and Serum. This means Step will always be the best priced location to Swap with the most liquidity (keep in mind Raydium deploy their liquidity to the DEX so we also get the benefit of Raydium TVL when swapping). We have plans for a V2 and V3 for the Swap router in future but for now this a good base to start accruing fees on each Swap which eventually goes back to STEP Stakers.
The Next Steps
The team is now focused on rolling out new value accrual items in each new release and you will see a number of interesting new things appearing on Step over the coming weeks. One thing we think Solana is lacking is an AMM that’s flexible enough for permissionless listings of new tokens and their emissions farms so teams can launch their token pools and emissions direct from within Step Finance with a standard template of an emission schedule. Step will be following the example set by Bancor in this regard with multiple pools denominated in STEP only which, when used in combination with our new Swap Router will enable users to swap at low cost from one currency to another via 2 Step pools in one transaction. For STEP tokenholers this means a massive new liquidity sink for STEP in addition to new protocol fees as swaps get routed through the pools and arbitraged against the DEX and other markets.
We are also looking to experiment over the coming weeks and months with the idea of vested token rewards for STEP whereby only a small % is claimable now with the remaining locked for a period although nothing is confirmed yet.
Conclusion
Overall the team is busy all day everyday in realising the mission for Step as being the front page of Solana, a place where people want to be to do everything they need to on-chain in addition to finding out new opportunities they perhaps weren’t aware of. The next 6 months our priorities are rolling out many of the accrual features which once we have a solid base we will look to add a STEP single asset staking pool to earn an APR from the accrued STEP. All the best and we look forward to the next Step!
