Step V3 Beta and Step Data API Launch
Well it’s been a while but it’s probably time to bring these blogs back. Today we are talking about a big milestone at Step and something that sets us up for the next few years — the launch of Step V3 and the Step Data APIs.
Before we get into the new goodies however it’s time for a recap of where things are at.
The Now
Step is more than a single product these days, we are a suite of different products and brands with the guiding principle of onboarding as many people into crypto so we can build a better civilisation based on math not the whims of whoever the human ruler is at the time- or as bitcoiners say: don’t trust, verify.
The core product is still the Step Dashboard. The place people on Solana go to check the net worth of their wallet taking into account all the tokens, NFTs, LPs, long/short perps, vaults and everything else that people do onchain these days. A lot of our initiatives are designed as a funnel to send people back to the dashboard at some point in their Solana journey which I’ll talk about later. We also have Step Analytics which is an essential tool for many important solana metrics, and the Step mobile app for Android and iOS.
We also own Solana’s biggest media company, SolanaFloor. SolanaFloor has grown massively this year with many more staff onboard including full time journalists, video content creators, social media, editors and more. We are the official media partner of Breakpoint 2024 and we are monetising the platform in various ways.
At Solana Allstars we are also the largest Solana event organization, if not largest crypto event organization in the world. Last month 6,000 people attended our events across 3 countries and we’re on track this month to get close to 8,000 attendees. Solana Allstars events are educational in nature, showcasing the products available in the Solana ecosystem and explaining to attendees how various concepts in crypto work. This drives more users to ecosystem dApps and our partners.
Solana Crossroads is our flagship conference and largest community conference in Solana. We welcomed 2500+ attendees this year in Istanbul, a 5x on the previous year and almost comparable to Breakpoint 2023. Solana Crossroads brings the Solana ecosystem together in one spot, at a 6 month offset to Breakpoint. We’ve chosen Istanbul to host Crossroads as it is more visa friendly than Breakpoint, so people from all over the world can come and be part of the ecosystem.
These are our core products and business units. The team is almost 30 strong now filled with people at the top of their field. All parts of the Step ecosystem are complementary to one another. At Allstars events people learn about using Solana apps like Step or our sponsors, people read the news on SolanaFloor using chart data from Step, and people pay to visit the conference operated by Step contributing to protocol revenue. All these projects make income that goes back to the protocol.
Step V3
The next big update to the Step ecosystem is V3 of the Step dashboard. This modernizes the Step dashboard design and brings with it new features including multi-wallet and soon historical PnL and other much requested items, which utilize our new indexing infrastructure under the hood. Gone are the days of protocol coverage integrations happening in the frontend codebase and many slow RPC calls. Everything will soon be serviced directly from our new backend APIs designed to handle a much larger scale more efficiently and quicker.
We think you’ll love the revamp of the Step Dash and on Monday we are launching the MVP of V3, or as we are calling it, V3.0 beta. This will showcase direction in design and a few small new features but it WILL NOT have feature parity with V2. Following Breakpoint we will launch V3.1 which will have feature parity with V2 and following that V3.2 which will include more exciting new features. This will happen in the span of a few months and the groundwork will be carried over to the mobile app eventually, making the Android and iOS Step apps a fully functional Step Dashboard akin to what people are used to on the web.
This also simplifies our codebase and makes maintenance and upgrades quicker and in the case of the app, a lot of the codebase will be shared with the web so we are only working on one core product. Step Analytics, which was previously a standalone website will be integrated into V3 over time and you’ll note in the MVP we also bring in news and events from other parts of the Step ecosystem, making it true to our tagline of being “The Front Page of Solana”. As always join the discord and get in touch with us to provide your feedback on the beta so we can make 3.1 even better.
Step Data API
Our new backend APIs are powering the Step V3 beta, and for the first time we are opening this up to anyone in the ecosystem to build on. Step has a rich dataset of protocol integrations from building the Dashboard since 2021 that literally no other project has, and would take years to replicate.While some projects have parts of the onchain data puzzle, nobody has the full thing or can service it to customers at scale.
There is a fundamental scaling issue with indexing all of this data then serving it to clients as fast as possible. Most programs on Solana are not public (including IDLs and previous versions of IDLs), and most projects have very poor documentation. As a result, anyone seeking onchain information must manually visit each project, build custom implementations to read and parse the data, store it in a database and serve it for user requests. This is the same approach we took for building the Step Dashboard, and this is how we can show you your wallets positions on the dashboard.
We are looking to talk to anyone from Hobbyists to Enterprise who need accurate, timely and scalable Portfolio and Transaction History data on Solana and are excited to onboard Tier 1 Exchanges, Tax/audit software companies, Wallets and more as our launch customers.
The Rest of 2024
The rest of this year we’ll focus on rolling out updates to V3, onboarding more clients to the Step Data API, and scaling up our ability to handle more requests. Our other projects also have ambitious targets to meet and scale. Solanafloor is growing at a rapid pace, Solana Allstars is opening to new countries and growing attendees at a huge rate, and the next Crossroads has almost finished its planning stages.
We’ll share more on all those initiatives in a later blog post. Today’s story is on how V3 and the Data API are leading the way in providing useful data on Solana for people and projects who need it.
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