George Harrap on Step Finance's Solana asset management

0:02i'm ashton addison from block west capital for investment pitch media in the Crypto Coin Show and today on blockchain interviews we have george harop co-founder of step finance george welcome to the show and thank you for being here today thanks so much for having me ashton it's great to be here you're very welcome i'm really excited to dive into the solano ecosystem

0:22how step finance is helping and bringing more people into the ecosystem making it a lot easier it really looks like you have quite a variety of tools to help out users and i would love to dive into that but i first just want to get a little bit of background on yourself in the space and how you came to co-found step finance sure yeah well i've been in crypto for i guess a decade

0:48now it's coming on 10 years this year or maybe it's already passed i guess now so yeah i mean you know i discovered bitcoin back in 2011 i was one of the early miners i was one of those guys that was making a buying graphics cards off ebay to go and make a miner in my in my room and i was a student at the time and it was kind of a way to make a heater

1:12which makes money and that's the best kind of heater that you can have right so yeah you know i got into crypto i didn't know anything about finance i was studying electronics engineering at the time but i sort of i got into it from i guess the tech the tech side and the tech background and everything from there i'd talk myself but yeah in 2014

1:34Everything was moving ahead you know i wanted to get into the space a bit more i decided to get on a plane go to hong kong and co-found a company with a friend of mine and we were the first remittance company using crypto to send money so you know that was that was a great experience you know learned a lot you know along the way

1:54But essentially i guess in 2020 you know my that previous chapter closed and i was sort of getting into defy and i was you know with a couple of friends thinking well what's the best way that we can really make an impact here i wasn't really clear like i wanted to if i was going to do my next you know thing my next startup i wanted it to be something which was

2:21had an impact somewhere and had a real purpose and was something that was useful so you know initially we started with just a dca platform and we thought hey dollar cost averaging buying various coins over a time period pretty simple straightforward but it didn't really exist in the d5 world we tried ethereum it was way too expensive we tried the side chains

2:45same sort of deal there was no liquidity there as well at the time and we found solana and we found that actually all of the things which people want to buy all of the different defy coins they're all there they all have liquidity the world's largest market maker alameda is providing liquidity for them and if we were to do a dca well there was a hackathon coming up

3:05and that seemed like a good way to get into it so at the start of this year a couple friends of mine got together and we decided to start step finance and we entered the hackathon we started with this dca product but through the end of the hackathon we actually realized you know what like we could just be another service provider that's like hey

3:24come use my product it's good because this is what we do and this is our narrow you know thing that we do but actually what solana was lacking at the time was somewhere to bring all of these projects together in one place you know as like a central dashboard a central portfolio manager a central place to execute these transactions so that's that's essentially what step

3:44finance evolved into and has become today and yeah i mean we're growing really fast we have a team of seven at the moment and yeah focused on solana and building out cool products to make people's lives easier very cool george and it definitely sounds like you're in it for the tech if you've been in it since for that long buying graphics cards at the very

4:03beginning not in finance and you're still here yeah you're still here yeah and we're still early as well so there's still the rest of our lives to go and it's only going to continue to grow so very interesting background story and you mentioned quite a few little tips about step finance there i wonder if you can dive a little bit deeper into step finance sort of give an overview

4:27for the viewers on what are the different functionalities that they can do within step finance and how can it help them get into the solana ecosystem if they're not in there yet yeah so i guess to frame this right d5 is a thing which is happening i think everyone you know is realizing that and we think that it's not going to be a binary you know 100

4:47zero with ethereum every all the d5 stuff is going to be on ethereum and nothing else elsewhere we actually think that the future of crypto is going to be multi-chain there's going to be a lot of different chains which do a lot of different things and especially in the d5 world you know there is a place for other chains to excel in d5

5:08and i really think that solana's one of those candidates if not the other candidate other than ethereum so you know it might not be 100 zero it might be you know 50 50 or 60 40 or something like that at the end of the day so you know our thesis is that defy is going to continue to grow on salada and given that there needs to be what we call the

5:30front page of solana so there needs to be a place where you can you know manage your portfolio see your positions across multiple contracts of which you know there's hundreds of projects now starting up on solana from you know dexes lending platforms nfts all sorts of different things and there needs to be you know one place to really find out like

5:54what on earth is happening with my wallet like did i forget my money somewhere so that's the first pillar of what steps trying to do the second pillar is what we also want to do is it's about monetizing user attention so there are different applications which we all use every day in the d5 world right like a meta mask is a good example of that you know that's a wallet

6:15that millions of people use they interact with every day they always have that tab up on their computer if they're dealing with this stuff you know coin gecko might be another one you know monitoring the gas fees might be another one if you're in ethereum land but there are things which always have a user's attention and i think that is certainly really valuable

6:35because once you have the user's attention well you know then people can you can be able to present them with things of which they can execute transactions and do stuff and if they do stuff on your platform then you know you can earn a fee and revenue that way right so essentially you know step two i guess for us is to be that place that has people's

6:54attention and how do we do that well that's step three is we have to have things which you know people actually want to use products services in this case you know we have a swap aggregator on step as well so we're the first on solana to do that think of it kind of like one inch on ethereum where there are multiple pools there are multiple decks all across solana

7:15and we have a balancer which essentially selects the best price so whatever you're trying to transact on solana you know step is always going to be the best place for that we also have things like you know transaction history for reporting people that need to get transaction data from the chain about what you know what their wallet is doing that doesn't exist anywhere else

7:36on solana we also have an nft gallery we have the largest coverage of nfts on solana currently so you know users can you know when you're purchasing whatever you want in the nft world you need to be able to visualize it somewhere often it's on some strange website somewhere on the internet but we bring all of that together and we also include a price

7:57in your portfolio as well so you know these things have prices and they should be as part of your portfolio with a price so you know that's another element as well but yeah i mean you know at the moment we have integrations with a lot of other different projects lending platforms and we have conversations with almost every team in solana at the moment but yeah

8:20you know a bridge is also coming very soon in solana which is i think a necessary element for attracting a lot of this tbl which is coming into the ecosystem so you know there's a lot of these different services right and these services we all put on step you know this is one place where people can transact even across other people doing

8:39completely different stuff to us you're still able to do that from step so yeah that's sort of a bit of an overview about what we are and what we do that's great george and yeah it's there's a lot to manage especially when you have so many different websites and so many different places to transact to be able to put it into one spot is going to make it a lot easier and to

8:59also be able to just see it in one little chart i say you can have like it all broken down on where where your nft is you know where's your lending happening and so but i guess right now you know it only is going to show things in the solana ecosystem you'll still have to manage other blockchains outside of that as well right yeah so at the moment we're we're just

9:24focusing on solana right like we're our focus is to be number one there and to really you know have a footing in the solana ecosystem but having said that like it has always been our mission that look we think d5 is going to be you know multi-chain so you know what other multi-chains you know come out in the future whether it's polka dot you know

9:44whether it's bsc or something like that you know these are things which we're we're thinking that yes eventually this is something we'd like to be able to add some value there as well but solana at the moment's a little bit bespoke because it uses a different programming language to some of these other chains so that can be a blessing and a curse

10:02but it can also mean that there's a little bit of a barrier there to be able to interact with other chains but for the moment there's so much to be done on solana we're quite happy you know in our position where we are at the moment definitely that's great to hear george and maybe you could touch a little bit more on the solana ecosystem i know you know your team obviously

10:20chose that as a great starting point but for the people that are for the majority in ethereum or just trying to figure out why they should move and start using assets on solana and nfts and d5 can you give a scope of where it's at right now maybe in comparison to ethereum and where you expect it to be in the next 12 months with the growth of the solana ecosystem

10:44absolutely so i think things have really kicked off this year for solana and some of these alternative d5 chains so you know i mentioned before that the dca contract that we were that we were building we did that on ethereum we had six users and it was going to cost us 180 dollars just in transaction fees to execute just one trade right so you can imagine that okay you

11:04know if we're charging one percent of trade we only have six users and it's costing us 180 bucks how much money do we need to have in our dca contract to even break even it's something like a you know millions of dollars or something like that right so you know fee and fees and scalability is a real problem and you know i think that's one of the core tenets of where solana is at is

11:22that it's trying to solve this fee this speed and scalability problem so we saw the solana ecosystem really rocket up in tbl this year i think tvl is currently at about 2 billion something like that and as i mentioned before you know the world's largest market maker is making markets there on the decks so there's a there's a dex which spans the entire

11:44Blockchain itself it's called serum and that's kind of like a focal point for liquidity unlike ethereum where they might be like i guess you'd call it different islands so you might have uni-swap land you might have sushi land you might have balancer and they're all kind of a bit isolated and that's only going to further fragment with l2s coming down

12:02the pipeline as well but with solana you know everything's on the same level and there's one dex you know that everyone uses fully open source so you know that's certainly one key element we see but as i mentioned before there's been a couple of hackathons those hackathons recently i think the last one there was something like 10 000 individual developers which

12:22signed up and there was hundreds of projects which got made from that which is really incredible so you know when we're talking about growth of a new ecosystem that's great to see so you know these things are anything from you know gaming blockchain gaming it could be the lending protocols i mentioned before kind of like your aves like cream these sorts of things

12:42there's about four of them now on solana you know we've got various different dexes we've got leverage protocols as well like like mango would be on solana land the equivalent of something like a dydx in ethereum land somewhere where you can you know manage perps and so on so like everything that you can maybe think of in d5 which exists on ethereum there's

13:07often a counterpoint to it on solana right now and they're only really just getting started it's kind of you know early days yet but well i think we're we're pretty much at feature parity for the most part and also to keep in mind there's there's lots of different wrapped ethereum coins as well erc20s on solana so like you know i've been saying before if

13:29you want to buy sushi wi-fi you know these other crv these other tokens which are pretty popular in the d5 world on ethereum like they exist on solana and instead of paying 180 dollars per transaction it's something like you know a fraction of 10th of a cent or something like that and you can do that instantly so yeah very cool and i just might

13:52also say you know we've had a lot of people joining step and solana who've perhaps never used ethereum before and they maybe came from bsc or maybe they came from some other chain which you know was essentially cheap because there was a point earlier this year when you know it was like a hundred dollars to just do a swap in ethereum with the with the gas

14:13fees so i think you know there's a lot of users which haven't been exposed to the whole breadth of d5 but you know what they really do care about fees and it really is an important thing for them and they probably would never want to go to some chain which is going to charge them a lot of money in that respect so you know i think solana has a good niche

14:32You know right there definitely yeah great explanation george and i also want to touch on because we haven't talked about it yet the step finance token and how step is involved in your ecosystem and how it relates to solana and how it provides value for the users in the ecosystem could you touch on that yeah so i think the key point there is provides value right and before i

14:55was mentioning like if we're this gateway this front page of solana which has people's attention which is showing them useful information that they care about which is providing them useful products that they can execute transactions on you know that is a that is a good place to be so for example you know we can look at you know one of our features

15:14is compounding auto compounding so like when you're in a yield farm you might want to reinvest your profits back into the yield farm and you know that's a way to essentially get a higher yield over time and apy versus an apr of different things right so you know for us we take a small fee on that the swaps is another one where we take a small fee on that as well

15:38And there's there's a couple of other features coming down the pipeline pretty soon you know which will i mention the bridge before which will also be taking a fee so along the way you know there are ways of which look we're providing a useful value-adding service which people want to use and they're willing to pay a fee for it and this is generating

15:58revenue for the protocol now what is the best way in this decentralized world that we live to say distribute the gains i guess of a revenue in a protocol you know in the old days it was a company right and the company was incorporated in some jurisdiction it had a bunch of people that sit on the board you know all of this kind of stuff

16:19right and generally the company made money and if i thought the company was great it might not be possible for me to invest in that company i guess what's happened in the d5 world is a lot of these tokens and protocols have come along where it's you know if you become a token holder then you have some sort of skin in the game regarding the actual

16:40protocol itself and if the protocol does well then your assumption is that you know as a token holder you might do well as well so that's the whole idea behind the step token a percentage of fees 100 percent of the money which is made by the protocol goes back to buyback this is a common thing in the crypto land so there's buy back and distribute to

17:00stakers who are staking the token and yeah you know essentially that's that's how it started so you know the step token's been around for about three months now a bit over three months we had a very successful launch the biggest on solano we had 20 26 000 active users at the time of launch we have a lot of big names on board and yeah you know the going forward

17:21it's all about there's this point between essentially you want your revenues to grow and you want your emissions to go down and you reach a point where they there's an inflection point and that's the important part where essentially you know your revenues and buybacks eclipse your new coins coming into circulation which puts net positive pressure on

17:42on the price of the tokens so everything that we that we're doing at the moment is to really build revenue for the protocol and we can only do that by adding things that people want and are willing to pay for sounds great and congratulations on that successful launch it's still so early on and i'm looking forward to seeing how the platform is going to continue to

18:02grow and speaking of that you know we don't have a lot of time left but i want to look towards the future maybe you can talk about some of the major updates that you and your team are planning to roll out with step between now and the end of 2021 absolutely so you know there's a couple of things number one yield farming is certainly a niche which we occupy

18:22so we are going to be debuting our own amm very soon and part of that will be a yield farming creator four new teams that perhaps you know want to set up a pool they want to set up an emissions pool and they don't know where to do it at the moment you kind of have to ask permission from various protocols and be like hey hey guys like can you please like list

18:42our token and these sorts of things so you know for us it's just going to be you click a few buttons and you can do it all permissionlessly so i think you know on the yield farming front on the amm front and that's also going to hook into our aggregator as well and it's kind of like bancor if anyone's familiar with that where you know every

19:00a side of every pool is actually in the step token itself so it becomes a liquidity sync so the amm is one the other theme that we're seeing is nfts and we want to be this marketplace for nfts we already have this gallery the next step is really sort of allowing people to buy and sell tokens to be able to browse all of the active tokens all of the

19:20active nfts that are available and be that central focal point in solana for the nft world so these are sort of the two big big places you know that we're going at the moment is the marketplace and the imm very cool george and for the viewers that are looking to follow along with those updates and just to start using step right now what's the best way for them

19:41to get involved in the community and to learn more absolutely so our website step.finance that's the best place to go you know we have the social links we have a twitter which is always posting our latest updates and the discord of course we're very active in discord we have a good community so please stop on by step.finance and come and join

20:00one of our communities sounds great george all the best with step finance moving forward and let's follow up in the near future thank you so much ashton will do