Step Group Changes
Today we are announcing some big changes to Step Group and our related companies which we think better sets us up for the long term and makes our organisation more efficient. As many of you know, Step consists of 5 companies (Step Finance dashboard and related services, SolanaFloor, Crossroads, Allstars Academy and Remora) with each having their own objectives, goals and revenue potential. We are today announcing that we will be sunsetting the Step Dashboard, APIs, and Mobile App. The team will shift full focus to Remora and SolanaFloor. Allstars will remain and with Crossroads we are considering what future events look like. The token remains unaffected and there are no retrenchments happening. We are focusing on our winners with clear PMF, cutting the dead weight and launching a venture arm.
Step Dashboard, APIs, and Mobile App wind down
Obviously this may come as a shock to many of you as Step Finance has been our core brand for many years now. In fact we were the 3rd solana company to exist back when it was just Serum and Raydium. The product has had millions of users over its lifecycle with for most of the 4 years of existence around 300k MAUs. However, times change and markets change, nobody is using DeFi en masse anymore, there is no real way to monetize it (and why many of our competitors pivoted, got acquired or went out of business) and having a product which is a summation of other peoples products makes it a hard sell when the ‘other peoples products’ aren’t being used much anymore and you need a position there to utilise our product.
Maintaining this massive infrastructure, probably some of the most complicated infra in all of Solana, is a burden which doesn’t make sense continuing with. It’s hampering our ability to innovate and build new exciting things. We sell API access to many prominent customers, Tier 1 exchanges and other ecosystem projects and now with Step shutting down there will be no other API providers for realtime and historical data on user positions. However it doesn’t make enough money to cover costs and market size is at most like $50,000 a month even if a bunch of other bigger projects on other chains magically wanted access.
The recent wallet launch was our attempt at getting people to take an onchain position without needing to visit the DeFi platforms directly, they could do it within the wallet via a blink. While the general concept is sound it still requires us to maintain all the existing infra build for the dash and API just to service the wallet which wasn’t worth it. To get back to building new things quickly we need to take a flamethrower to the old stuff, torch it and start fresh.
Overall this has been something brewing for a while and we have been following the sunk cost fallacy until now, it’s time to rip the bandaid off and the good news is this will enable a rapid advancement of our work on other more high growth high value things. There will be a wind down period for Step’s products of at least a month so users can move money from the wallet and find alternatives to their API usage.
Winners Win
Our biggest winner and clear market leader now and into the foreseeable future is SolanaFloor. We have a large and growing journalistic team and we are expanding into more events, videos and interesting content every month. The SolanaFloor team has been operating with pretty much one part-time dev here and there to help with things when needed, now they’ll have an army of engineering resources when needed. Solanafloor makes money with advertising and promotional partnerships and you’ll be seeing more and more SF branded events as time goes on. We want to pour fuel on the fire of Solanafloor and accelerate to be a media conglomerate for crypto and perhaps beyond.
Remora is another newer but very exciting initiative, it’s making money and for our 5 stocks we often have more onchain liquidity than our competitor right now. We have some big plans and initiatives coming soon for Remora and having a full team working on it will help a lot in building out our vision and doubling down on our competitive advantage — that is, a killer team building onchain products. We recently met with some suits who built something they thought would help price discovery of these assets, they didn’t realise their web2 service is unaddressable by onchain programs so it’s literally pointless. Many such cases lol. Remora is a simpler product that can be refined much easier, far better usage of time and resources.
Step Ventures
The Step Foundation’s charter states that its role is to continue to manage money and deploy it for the benefit of the Step ecosystem. The Step ecosystem is our brands, products and services of the group. Having a number of high valuable brands that make money is the goal here and today we are starting on the journey of formalising that more with Step Ventures. It will particularly be focused on making more real world investments that have real demonstrable value. The exact structure and mechanics of the Venture arm is still under development but suffice to say it’ll likely require a whole new team to manage and implement with different skillsets than what we currently have. The goal here is to continue to grow the value of the Step Ecosystem over time and create value for participants in the ecosystem.
2026 and Beyond
Our other brands like Allstars Academy remain unchanged at the current time and we are evaluating what the future of events might look like for Crossroads. Soon Step Group will consist of many more brands and companies and that is a good thing. We want to be able to experiment more and double down on things with clear PMF and these changes were necessary to achieve that. As we come into the new year there will be a lot of movement internally as we set up for the new era and by next year you’ll likely hear us announcing more new initiatives. Thank you to everyone who has been with us on the journey thus far and for this next phase that the team is super excited to put into action.
