Step Q1 Roadmap Overview
A new year is upon us and the team at Step is back at it with a general action plan for Q1. We have decided on some general high level goals for Q1 which will inform the tasks and features that get built and we are happy to share some information on that today.
Part of the problem of building in DeFi is a trilema of:
Coverage: having timely support for new projects as they come online so user positions are available in dashboard)
Features: useful features people need that may not be fee paying, often UI only)
Tokenomics: (features and systems which capture value for the token holders).
Assume you can only have 2 of them not all 3, what do you choose? Its a balancing act… Especially given one often impacts and can accelerate or decelerate the other
At the end of the day it comes back to the core metrics we measure success by:
- Monthly Active users
- Protocol Revenue
- % of STEP locked/Staked
- App performance
- AMM growth
Everything we do at Step must fit into these broad categories and a key focus this year is exposing more trackable data to Steppers on these categories. We previously shared some of the metrics on AMM growth last month https://twitter.com/StepFinance_/status/1473947884395667460 and will be providing more monthly metrics on xSTEP distributions like we do here.
Q1 Priorities
- App Performance
- Coverage
These two are baseline requirements to ensuring Step remains the largest portfolio manager on Solana. We will be focusing on integrating major projects more thoroughly than before (transaction history support etc) and picking and choosing our integrations based on demand. Crucial to all of this is ensuring the app remains snappy and fast, right now with all the integrations its starting to slow down in some areas but we are working on speeding things up as evidenced by our deployment last week speeding up DEX order loading by 80%.
- Locking xSTEP and gauge weight shifting via Tribeca
We have been pleased to see the release of Tribeca, we always intended on building this sort of setup but having an open platform that the rest of the ecosystem is partaking in is a much better situation to be in. There will be some customisation and likely additional contract(s) we will need to build for our situation however we think this will bring a few big benefits to Step.
Firstly locking for a rev share of protocol fees in addition to vote weight will remove more STEP from circ supply. Secondly you need an economic reason to lock and vote for gauges so we are considering a few models that may make it more enticing, boosting yields and AMM TVL while limiting incentives to < locked amount so all incentives are a NET reduction in circ supply. Thirdly we might look to tie this into our soon to be launched Reward Options in some way with lockers able to influence the number of reward options they can accrue.
We will have more info on this at a later date.
- Features and Enhancements to UX
We hear your feedback! There are lots of things we want to implement as cool features to make life easier for everyone. A few more tools will be live soon in addition to NFT Gallery enhancements and other things we will keep quiet on for now. One big thing holding back more development here is getting some of our performance redesign done first which will speed up subsequent developments.
- New value accruals
xSTEP will be the core asset used for locking/staking and borrowing against. There are some easy wins to be done like lending protocol listings, automated leveraged xSTEP farming via borrowing STEP and depositing xSTEP and also some more involved large scale contracts which we will talk about later.
The idea we are pursuing here is any future value accrual must have more than 1 purpose and must impact more than 1 area of the Step platform. For example with more people locking via Tribeca that reduces circ supply which given same demand increases price which increases TVL as half of Step TVL is STEP denominated which reduces swap price impact which incentivises more swaps from abitragers from Jupiter which increases APYs for LPs which incentivises more LP deposits etc…
- Marketing Push
Youll already see Step appearing on some of your favourite crypto websites and podcasts today. We are excited to be sponsoring the Layah Heilpern show, Banners/Logos on DefiPulse, The Defiant and mentions in Altcoin Daily and other popular platforms. We are eager to partner with more influencers in the space where we can to get the Step message out there to a wider audience and also are improving our online reach by having more brand ambassadors and community advocates as part of the team.
A key part of this is referrals. Doing referrals in the old world for CEXs is easy however when applying it to DeFi its much more difficult ensuring the system cannot be gamed/exploited. Referrals are on our roadmap and we want to get them implemented soon as we have time and priorities allow.
This is a generalised list of our goals for Q1, there will no doubt be some surprises good and bad along the way but looking forward to the journey and onwards and upwards!
Step Team
