StepDAO and Solana Allstars- The Next Step
There are two major announcements we want to highlight today, but more importantly it’s time to also take a deeper look into how we approach growth at Step
Step Finance- Unifying The Brand
Step Finance is us. Its the core product (the dashboard), brand, community and everything we work on everyday. We also have a number of other brands which are also Step:
- Solanafloor- NFT News and Data Analytics
- Solana Crossroads- IRL Events
- The Next Billion- Our podcast
- Step Data Insights- Onchain Data research reports / Newsletter
Step also is one of the top 3 most active dapps in Solana for the last 2 years:
- 2.4million+ unique users
- 51 000+ Monthly active users
- Integrations with the vast majority of the Solana ecosystem
- Several millions of monthly impressions on socials etc
The Dashboard app is probably what most people still remember us as. But we are bigger than that, much bigger. As you can see above the other brands we run are focused on one thing: growing the pie. Need to know whats up with your wallet? Use Step. Wanna read about monkey jpegs and check pricing? Use Solanafloor. Totally new to crypto and want to listen know more? Check the podcast. More sophisticated and want more data insights? Check the data research reports etc.
We want to create as big of a funnel as possible to our products, this is how we can grow the number of users and ultimately grow protocol revenue. But its not immediately obvious to any particular viewer of the above products that Step is behind it all.
Communities are like liquidity pools, the more people in one pool the better, rather than the same number of people in separate pools. More people together in one spot generates more discussion, interest and usage/traction. We need to do a better job of uniting our products together.
Enter: StepDAO.
Step DAO- One Stop Shop
We have seen DAOs before, something something governance or something something voting is the usual spin on things, Step DAO is none of these. We are actually inspired by the work in the last 6 months done by Superteam and SAMO DAO where communities have been created from nothing and within a few months are a hive of activity and productive work. They have been able to bring in new people to crypto that otherwise would not have stumbled upon a random discord and they have developed novel ways to add value by bounties for building things. The core features of these DAOs are:
- Bounties for micro tasks that benefit the DAO/Ecosystem/Partner project. The work of the DAO is directly productive.
- Regional focus on particular markets (eg Superteam Turkey or Superteam India etc)
- Bounties are broad and not just dev related. Bringing in more people with different skillsets
- The DAOs are more of a place to discuss the bounties and in general the ecosystem at large.
Step DAO builds on these principles and will be as follows:
- StepDAO will be one community, one discord for all Step Finance brands and projects. Everyone in one place.
- StepDAO will feature bounties, paid in STEP, for micro tasks for the benefit of the DAO both technical and non-technical.
- Increase community engagement and discussion via bringing together all Step projects
- Increase throughput of development of cool products for all Step Finance projects. No longer solely dependant on the technical throughput of the Step dev team.
- Bounties will have specific criteria and guidelines, decided upon by the Step team when the bounty is created, which all submissions must adhere to.
The website is now live with the wait list to be notified on launch very soon.
Updated Tokenomics for STEP
Note the second point above about STEP. One of the cool things with all this is massive new utility to the STEP token. It will be core to the functioning of the DAO and all Step projects. It could be content writing in another language, building a mobile app, hosting a meetup in your local city etc. All of this will operate and be dependant on the STEP token.
Where will the STEP come from? From the large portion of supply 35%+ which is in the ‘community pool’ which currently only enters via reward options. The point of this portion of supply was always to pay for productive efforts for the Step ecosystem so this is now the best way to utilise this supply for productive useful purposes. STEP only enters circulation via Reward Options AND the DAO and the DAO only rewards bounties in STEP for things which grow the STEP ecosystem.
Solana Allstars
Ever heard of Binance Angels? Why does Binance have 90% marketshare in like 100+ countries? Its due to initiatives like the Binance angels program.
Binance Angels is a very successful program of in person micro events all around the world where superfans are incentivised via various methods (merch, referrals) to host meetups in their local town/city. The meetups are regular 50–100ppl meetups where the attendees learn about Binance’s product, how to use it and general crypto education. People who visit the meetups post about it online, this gets millions of impressions, and reaches more and more eyes on the Binance brand and product.
Essentially its an onboarding mechanic for Binance and distribution mechanic for Binance partners. Solana Allstars is our version of this program with some added benefits.
Solana Allstars is the following:
- In person events, 50–100 people, in any location in the world, hosted and managed by community superfans in the DAO
- Solana ecosystem onboarding and education
- Distribution mechanism for project partners- get your product infront of thousands of people every month
- Events are organised, managed and run by an Allstar. A person in the community who has extensive knowledge of the ecosystem and can grow a high quality community
- Event outcomes and metrics measured by the Allstar and reported every so often to the DAO. Working closely with the Step growth team.
- Scalable without requiring direct oversight of all things by Step or local knowledge etc.
IRL events is also in the realm of what we do at Crossroads. Our recent conference last week in Turkey was a massive hit and something we plan on doing more of this year.
The integration between Solana Allstars and Crossroads will be quite connected in that the mini-meetup style Allstar events will lead into the larger Crossroads events a few times a year. Its a customer acquisition strategy to drive more traffic to the larger Crossroads events which might be for a continent or region, the smaller meetups are what happens in between.
The best part about the Allstars program is….its already started, at launch of the DAO we will showcase the awesome professionally made video of our first event in Nigeria!
The Next Step
We plan to launch the DAO very soon in the coming week or two and have bounties up at launch. The Allstars program also launches then and so does the discord migration to the Step discord. We mainly will be merging the Solanafloor discord and adding new channels or removing current ones to ensure discussion in the new discord can relate to all projects aswell as DAO content and bounties etc. Bounties will be both non-technical and technical and we intend to also do a few major features to Step via the DAO.
The DAO will be a focus for the growth team meanwhile we continue to power ahead on analytics and data indexing. Subscriptions will be dropping soon along with a slew of new interesting datapoints. The podcast continues to grow with some exciting new segments coming soon, Solanafloor News launch recently has been a big hit, with 40% of new arrivals to the site coming for the News. Step Data insights Q2 report recently dropped with the most well researched discussion in all of Solana.
This is just the beginning of a new chapter in the growth of Step and we look forward to seeing you all in the DAO soon!
