Hello, hello, good morning. Oh, oh my gosh. Okay, so I guess the music stops as soon as I unmute my mic. But check this out. They have a new feature in spaces where if you mute, you can play ambient music. Hang on, watch this.
Hello, hello, can you hear me okay? Hello. Yes, we can welcome George Thank you very much. I'm sorry. What was that? Hang on, I think I'm having a little connection problem
And it looks like the music stopped. I think I guess it stops once you once the host unmutes the mic and speaks for the first time then it stops the ambient music. I'll keep that in mind. All right, let's get the link. I'm going to tweet the link. Let's give people a couple minutes to join. Bye, everyone.
Hi, Bowes, Hi, Nikki, and of course welcome George. Okay, hang on, I'm just gonna retweet. Slow day today it feels like. So good.
It's nearly Christmas. It's nearly Christmas. I think everybody's excited. Believe it or not, I haven't even finished my Christmas shop yet. I'm such a disaster, you guys. Oh, look, I'm the same already pre-gifted people stuff like a month ago. I think that was a bit solution.
That is smart. That's very smart. We talked about this yesterday too. It's like the holidays come the same time every year. It's like never a surprise, but somehow most people seem to be super last minute. But gifting a month in advance is a really good thing. Hello, George. How are you?
Hey, by the way, George, are you an Australia? I'm not. I'm currently in Europe just hanging out and yeah, I usually just fly around the world. So yeah.
Are you from Australia originally or are you from New Zealand? It's hard for me to tell the accent apart. What do you think? What's the best guess? How did New Zealand people sound? Because I have this discussion with a lot of people. Yeah. And it's just interesting to see where they fall on this spectrum.
I say Australia. Yeah, I will and now I think Australia because you're asking how new I don't know I you know what I really don't know I don't want to I don't know. I grew up in Australia, but I spent a bit of time in Kiwi land like a year or two ago. Yeah, and yeah, it's interesting.
They have a funny accent, but it's hard to maybe pick up for a lot of people. Maybe it's, I don't know, just Australians and New Zealanders always make fun of each other, so maybe that's why. Yeah. Yeah. I think the New Zealand accent's a little bit for you. I do love it. Yeah, they say, they say, "Fosh."
instead of fish, which is very weird. Oh, and it's like every like, well, some syllables and what do you call it? Some vowels are like reversed for some reason. Yeah. Oh, fascinating. I haven't spent, I guess I just haven't ever really listened to an Australian and a New Zealander speaking
side by side or being able to compare the accents enough but that makes sense I'm sure there are little nuances. Hey guys, where is everyone this morning? Slow start. Yeah, probably they're traveling to other states or to other places to go to their families.
Christmas holiday. We also did a space yesterday so maybe people are over us for the week. They're like okay. What no way, no way. They came to our karaoke session the other day and we're like wow I'm getting I'm exiting this community.
Now that might be a possibility. That's probably more likely right? Speaking up, we're going to do more karaoke this afternoon I think in the back brigade. But yeah, you know, we can kick off the spaces recorded anyway. So anyone who misses it can tune in later and usually as we roll along it starts to kill up even if it
It's a slow morning. So let's kick off. Let's kick off. All right. Well, welcome back everybody to another back community Twitter spaces. This is our 41st, which is very exciting for me. When we started doing these the beginning of the year, I thought we'd do them really sporadically, but we've been real consistent and I'm proud of us.
and you'll pay yourselves on the back team. And yeah, today we have Step Finance in the House George from Step Finance who's the co-founder and CEO. A little overview of Step Finance is they describe themselves as the front page of Salana. We'll dive into what that means because I'm not even sure.
It is the largest portfolio dashboard on Solana and provides data insights about your wallet in addition to the rest of the ecosystem. That makes it easy for anyone to monitor their portfolio token balances, AMMLPs, yield farms, and more, with coverage of about 95% of the Solana ecosystem. Wow.
So let's just hop right in. You know, hmm, should we do the interest today? I'll just do it. I'll make it fast for anyone who listens through recording. So for anyone who ends up listening or visiting from outside of the back community, welcome. We are the basic attention token community. Basic attention token or back is a
in Ethereum based utility and rewards token in a new, well fairly new blockchain based privacy respecting advertising platform piloted by Brave. You can think of that as a unit of account between the three who Brave considers to be the three main parties or users of the web. So users publish
and advertisers. Brave is a fast and secure web browser that blocks creepy third-party ads, including ads on YouTube, the ones everyone cares about, and trackers by default. Instead, it enables users to earn tokens back by choosing to see ads that are privacy-respecting. That can be used to support your favorite content.
Cons and Creators Digital Publishers or even causes through tips or automatic monthly donations via a Patreon-style contribution system built natively into the Brave browser. You can also use that to transact, like a normal crypto, Mint NFTs, purchase items in several blockchain-based games, and more. In addition to that, the Brave
browser ships with a private search engine called Brave Search, which uses its own index and the Brave wallet. A user-friendly, native multi-chain crypto wallet that doesn't require a browser extension like other hot wallets do, such as Metamask or Phantom. In addition, the wallet comes preloaded with support for multiple crypto networks and currently offers that support
for Ethereum and EVM compatible ecosystems and as of recently, Solana. There we go. That's the intro. Stay in touch with us after the spaces. If you're new to Batten Brave, check out our official website, brave.com, basicattentiontoken.org. But of course, please do that after we wrap the spaces so that, you know,
You're here listening and asking questions. That is our question of Mike. There you go. Also, hop into our discord discord.gg/batbergade. As for intros, my name is Jenny. I'm speaking from the Bat community account today. If you want to follow me on Twitter, I'm BAT_Geni with an i.e.
I'll be facilitating spaces with my lovely team. I am director of community and partnerships here at Baton Brave. I've been working for the projects since about 2018. I came through the community. I was active participant in the community and eventually was asked to join. You can DM me about anything. The M's are always open.
community related stuff, partnership related stuff, Ravel integrations and the like. And as for the team today, we have Drew, we have Guillermo, we have that earn who seems to be having trouble connecting, maybe he'll be back. And I think that's it for today. Small team in the house and then of course we have Nikki B.
audience and then we have our lovely guest George so we'll go through and we'll introduce everybody and then we'll hop into the question so maybe Drew can kick us off. Sure I'll go I'm Drew and I've been working with Brave and that for about a year. We're getting the community stuff
and usually you find me in the Discord server, the BAPAGade Discord server that Jenny just mentioned. I look forward to talking to George here from Step Finance and learning a little bit more about what they have going on because I noticed they got D5 stuff to look like, they got NFT gallery, they got all kinds of stuff going on there.
So look forward to this one. And also just a reminder you can get the Polap that Guillermo created in the Discord for attending this Thursday. Thank you, Drew. Guillermo. Hello, everyone.
from bad community alongside Drew and Jenny we all came from community now I do illustration and design I'm very excited to understand learn a bit more step finance I met George actually over a year ago and I remade him these year after the Solana breakpoint
and Nikki as well. Oh that's awesome. So wait you met before breakpoint and was that in person? We met for the first time a bit more in a year gone first breakpoint. I think that was the first breakpoint right George? Yeah yeah that was the previous breakpoint last month feels like a year ago so maybe the
Welcome George, okay George, co-founder and CEO of Step Finance. Tell us a bit about, give us some background about yourself, what you did before, leading up to Step Finance and then how you came to find Step Finance. - Yeah, for sure. Well, thanks for having me today.
It's a pleasure to be here. I always love talking to the brave peeps and the back communities. So yeah, look, I'm George. I'm, I guess on my Twitter, it says I'm the stepfather, it's step finance. That kind of just means that I'm one of the original dudes that kicked it off along with my buddy.
So yeah, look, I've been in crypto for like 12 years or something now So one of these grizzled veterans, I guess that probably have just been battered all of these times with all of this crazy stuff that goes on in the crypto land But no, look, I started as a Bitcoin minor. I was wondering
of the original Bitcoin miners doing GPU stuff, then one of the first to do FPGAs and in ASICs and that's how I got my start. I was a student. I didn't really have a proper job. So I just sort of built computers in my room that mined and made money for a bit. That was sort of the
the early 20 teens. And yeah, from there, I just taught myself about finance, essentially, from that. And back then, you know, there wasn't really much other than Bitcoin, and there was only really one or two websites on the internet about it, and a couple of forums and stuff where people talk about things, so different world. But then, 24/7,
I went off with another friend of mine to start the first crypto remittance company, so I did that in Hong Kong, did that for six years, with first to send money around the world, cash in cash out in a bunch of different places. A lot of you start up journey stuff happening there, the typical sort of trajectory.
being bored eating ramen, all this stuff going around trying to find VCs and shake hands and all this sort of stuff. So look great, great experience there. But then I guess 2020 came around. It was time for something new. And I got together with a friend of mine and said, hey, we need to
We need to build something in this DeFi land and we essentially looked at a whole bunch of different chains at the time, sort of thinking what can we do to add value. We thought an initial just a DCA contract. So something which you can load some say USDT into and then it can buy some coins for you automatically and you don't have to trust anyone.
blah blah blah. Built out a prototype on Ethereum, but at the time, like, gaspies were like 500 bucks, so it was unprofitable and unscalable to do it that way. We looked at some L2s, they were just getting kicked off. Mattik was just starting and that's the thing. But it didn't have the coins which people wanted to buy.
So then we essentially came upon Solana and there was a hackathon going on, which is one of the really cool things that Solana are doing. And we entered that, and along with a couple hundred other people, all building stuff. And they had all the coins there, the liquidity was provided by the notorious now Alameda.
And it was a good place to build something because you could buy all the coins that people wanted because they were wrapped and it was cheap and you could do that scalably. So we built out a thing, we didn't win the hackathon or anything like that, but from that we decided, hey, actually we should pivot and maybe build
something that tracks all of these different apps and all these different things. So, you know, we sort of, that's where the genesis of Step came from and we built out essentially a dashboard to monitor all of these different integrations that were happening. So, you know, there was AMMs popping up, yield farms popping up, all sorts of crazy
So that's the whole idea with step is that one tab that you go to in the Salon Rika system tells you about all this stuff that's going on with your wallet and we connect to all these different wallets including the Brave Wallet.
Yeah, it's a place to monitor everything going on. So that's how sort of step started 2021 and since then we've sort of rode this journey a lot with Solana. We have a team of about 16 or 17 now I think. So yeah, so a lot of really cool people
building really cool stuff and yeah, you know, that's a great place to start. Yeah, that's a great place to start. Okay, so Steph Finance is like a one-stop shop for managing your, managing viewing your portfolio on Salona. Very cool. Now quickly back to your past,
Did you study business or compsie or it kind of sounds like you're totally self taught? Is that right? Yeah totally self taught don't have a qualification to my name too dumb to enter university because I failed the school so they didn't let me in but now I was halfway through and I
electronic engineering qualification and then a friend of mine had a real mining company, the ones who dig stuff out of the ground. He said, "Hey, do you want to get a job as a technician?" So I left that piece of paper and got the job as a technician. That was my first real job, which was really good. But I used to do crypto stuff
the site as well. I remember at work I used to have a web page up where it would be running like a trading bot for Mt. Gox, which if anyone's familiar with Bitcoin history or crypto history will know what that name is. But yeah, so I just used to do fun stuff on the side there. But yeah, that's sort of I guess a bit of my educational background.
That's wild. Did you have hand up? I thought I saw your hand go up there. Yeah, it was. It's maybe kind of diving in already. That's a pretty cool background though. Sounds pretty interesting and a little
the docks I guess but it's awesome. But I was going to ask you, like I know you said you shared Billy this on Salana and you know just with everything going on currently in the Salana space and you know everything's down right now but Salana's down pretty bad but
What are your thoughts on Solana still and why you guys really chose Solana and? Is playing kind of stick there and keep building on that? Yeah, for sure so I guess you know as I said when we first started Solana was a chain which didn't have anything
going on, but then it went from nothing to something very quickly within the space of 12 months. And the reason it, and like there's thousands of blockchains out there, right? You go on, you go on Coingecco or something and you'll see like 10,000 blockchains or whatever, but only a few really have the critical mass, right? And what is critical mass? Well, I mean, I would
define it as lots of individual projects and builders working on stuff and building individual projects. Essentially, activity, right? So a lot of people could also look at TBL as a metric or any of those sort of things. So Lana was able during the early days to really kickstart that.
create something out of nothing. And now I think where Salana's at, well we just had last month, we had the biggest builders conference that we've ever had. In fact, probably one of the bigger ones in all of crypto over in Lisbon and met some of the brave team there, of course. And I think there was about 3,000
900 people that went to that and a lot of people couldn't come because of visa issues and that sort of thing. So, and these hacker houses that happened around the world with Salana, that's another really cool thing. So, you know, in pretty much every month there's a city in the world somewhere which has some Salana hacker house and usually it has 1,000, 2,000 people that are there
doing stuff and building things essentially. So if we're looking at what's the, what's where's Solana right now? Obviously with the FTX collapse and all that sort of stuff, there was this implied association between FTX and Solana, but that doesn't exist. I mean FTX has done nothing with Solana for Sam hasn't tweeted about
it for a year or so. And yeah, number go down in a bear market. But if you look at the actual things going on and people building stuff, then like thousands of developers, hundreds of projects, I think things are doing pretty well. And I'm just super excited. And I like, I always
We have to know about all these projects as well because we literally integrate everyone. We have to have this coverage across the ecosystem and that's a core part of our product. Essentially, if you're connecting your wallet to step to see where you're money's at and we only show you where 70% of your
money's at, well it might as well be zero. And that's something which pushes us to make sure that we have really good coverage to show you 100% of where your money's at. So yeah, that's sort of a little bit of the salunder journey. Yeah, that's a great answer. I think it's a great point. I think
You know everybody was freaking out there and oh, we're gonna move to this chain or that chain and you know like you said a lot there's a lot of chains, but there's not a lot going on a lot of chains - yeah It's also it's hard to in a bear market as well kickstart something new
and like, yes, there's other chains out there that are like, hey, we're fast, but it's like cool, like so attend other people and also being fast is not good enough. Like you need to also have that critical mass and that ecosystem, right? So you need validators and infrastructure providers and multi-state
and AMMs and Dexas and Yield Farms and Lenders and Perp stuff and all this kind of stuff and really not many chains can say that they have all of that. I think there's only really Ethereum and Solana and that's it that have that depth of ecosystem. So trying to kick
start something at this stage is very tough. Obviously everyone wishes all the best and lots of stuff but I think at current time, as far as we're concerned, we're just focused on doing what we can on Salano because we think that that has that critical mass there and a lot of people building stuff so that's where we want to focus for now.
Yeah, lovely. So I'll let Jenny get back to the program. No, that was perfect. So given that there are so many builders and you know hundreds of emerging projects on Salana all the time. I mean it's so heartening by the way. You know that you feel so optimistic about the
ecosystem still and so do we. But how do you keep up with all of the emerging projects given that step needs to integrate with all of them? Yeah, so the last, I guess, major hackathon for Salana, I think, was probably three, four months ago that had like 500 and
50 different teams that entered that one and the teams usually consisted of about I think three to four people something along those lines and and then all of these individual hacker houses which happen in these different cities so before the Lisbon conference last month there was a five day one there's one coming up in February in Istanbul you know and all
around the world, there's all of these hacka houses and usually those ones as well have at least double digit numbers of projects which are started there or emerged there or something like that. So there's a lot, right? And I think as well for us, we could spend all of our days
just integrating stuff. But there's also a cost benefit to that as well. And when it's bull times and everything's pumping and everyone's like, "Where's this? Where's that? Where's my yield farms?" Okay, we've got to drop everything and we just work on integrations. But I think the cool thing that we've had happen in most of this year
is we've had time to build out other areas of the product as well and also more value-adding things. So, you know, for the most part, right now, like we have to draw some lines in the sand about where we integrate and what we integrate, right? So we can't just go and integrate everything. It's literally can't
do that even if you hire another 20 or 50 people or something. So I think what we have to do is go, hey, what do we want to integrate? What do we want to show on the dashboard as the core product? And there's more products as well coming very soon. But I think it does it have a critical mass of users, are people asking for
it, does it have reasonable TBL, the documents, substantial, all this sort of stuff. There's probably a bunch of things that we look at before we want to do an integration. That helps us focus on what's really important. That is also important, is just having that focus and making sure that we're actually doing
something that's productive and it doesn't make sense spending three weeks to integrate something which like five people use, you know, the cost benefits not there for that. So it's much better for us to spend three weeks on something 10,000 people use. Yeah, I think that makes a ton of sense. You want to integrate, you know, you want to integrate with projects that
are widely used and you want to vet them properly and make sure that it's worth your while, right? That makes a tenise. I have a question about the name, step finance. Where did the name come from and what's the meaning of it? That's a good question. I think
it was something that we we cooked up like a year or two ago when we were like what is something which is a name which is thought simple and can sort of show progress. So I thought like step was kind of cool because it's like hey it's like a stepping stone like
you're always moving up or something like that right so I just thought it was a it was a it was a cool sort of name with multiple meanings and actually we've we've been able to meme off it and stuff like that which I think is cool which absolutely helps I'm curious to see some of those memes actually but I think that makes sense and that's sort of
what I was thinking as I was researching the project a little bit and learning about it. I was like, "I feel like it's like you're integrating new pieces and steps." It just demonstrates progress and it just makes sense. So good name choice. Yeah, step by step. I set up exactly.
- Yes, I'm going to put George on his foot. You mentioned there are some new products being developed. Is there anything you can give us? - Yeah, well, tomorrow, I think it's tomorrow or the day after. We'll see how many hours it works out being
But we're launching our big stuff this year has been, "Okay, what steps key moat or key value add?" And for the first say, year and a half, it was the dashboard. It's all of the integrations. It's something that people need to come to every day.
where your money is at. It's always something that's useful to people, whether it's a bull or a bear market. That's all well and good, but what do we do beyond that? That's not something you can really monetize, it's not something you can keep going sustainably. Really, the key thing that we've actually been working on when you really look at it is
data. Because that's what we're showing on the dashboard, right? So it's really data. So we have all of these integrations which like nobody else has. So we should use that. And what we've been doing is indexing all of that data. And on a project by project basis, being able to display information
on different protocols. So that might be your percentage yield in a yield farm over time, either with or without emissions or or choral peas or stuff like that. So we're calling this the step analytics product and we have an alpha dropping like tomorrow or the next day for a couple in the couple of people.
the step community and then rolling it out a week later to Timor. And yeah, that will be sort of our first sort of new steps, I guess, in that data direction. And also, I would say that there's a lot of data platforms out already, right? And I segment data platforms in three different ways. Number one, you have
what I call level 1. So that's sort of how many transactions per second is a blockchain doing? Oh cool, Salana's doing 2000 today. Cool, that's a cool number that we can look at. Great, everyone gets it. It's quite easy to get that information. A lot of platforms are providing it. But it's like blockchain specific stats, I would call that. That'll be level 1.
Level two is you've got a lot of really good products out there like nanson or glass node or dune and they're showing you stuff that's more on like a wallet or blockchain basis So it's kind of like hey, this is a whales wallet and this is what a whale is doing and you know they're buying you know a million dollars worth of this coin or something and and people subscribe
to that because they want those kind of insights and they give unique insights into what's going on on chain and the ecosystem and where the money's out in bubble blood. I'll call that level two. And then there's what I would say level three and that's sort of the niche that we're trying to target which is protocol specific data. So that
instead of like telling you here's a wallet, it's more here is a lending protocol and this is the the APY's of this specific coin in that lending protocol over the last six months. Well this is how many people hold a particular LP of this protocol versus another or something like that right where it's very sort of protocol
specific requires custom integration kind of stuff a little bit more niche and it will be on a case by case basis as well. So that's the data which we're good at and that's what we've been doing. So I think it makes sense for us to target that and to try and be really good there. So yeah, that's what the step analytics products all about.
Thank you very much, George. I was a fabulous answer and I'm very excited to see what you have to come. Yeah, that's pretty exciting. It sounds like you're aiming to provide a niche or data than what's available in other platforms. And that's thanks in large part to the data that you're able to access via all of the integration
that you have. That's really, really cool. Now, actually, can you give us an overview of everything else that user can do a step, like currently, what are all the services and product currently available, just like high level? >> Yeah. Can we start at the chat feature?
or maybe it's an NFT project where they can tell you like the bid has been received by your NFT and you can see all of that in the step inbox. So it's kind of like an email sort of inbox where you can see notifications essentially. So we were the first to roll that out which is pretty cool. So that's one example, another example like
What are the things which people do with their wallets? So swaps, another one, we have swap integrations there. NFTs obviously, very big part of what's going on in Solana. We have a gallery there, shows you pricing across whatever marketplace, whatever collection it might be. We have a Charities tab as well to
for donations to different charities in the ecosystem. We have an opportunities page to showcase opportunities that might be available elsewhere in the ecosystem, so yield farms and whatever else. We have a transaction history page, so we were the first to provide, to give you a history of your wallet. And this is something
that a lot of people sound simple, but it's actually a very in-demand thing. If you're a accounting company or a tax company or something like that, a lot of people have asked us, "Hey, can you just give me actual information on what's going on with a wallet?" Yes, you can look at a block explorer, but that doesn't decode the information for you.
So you can see that there's a transaction and it's just blah blah blah blah blah like doesn't make sense right when actually that transaction was I don't know moving 200 USDT in a lending protocol from one place to another right so Stuff like that so transaction history is another one, but basically like a lot of different things we also have auto compounding for yield for
So a lot of different things that are tailored towards what people want to do and being able to sort of offer that in an easy way and targeting areas that make sense as well.
important that you don't try and do everything and you don't try and reinvent the wheel. So it's not like we want to go and rebuild a whole bunch of UIs for different people that, oh, I'm Protocol X and hey, you can do that on Protocol X or you can do it in step. I don't think that kind of adds too much value, but things like an auto compounding or something like
that would usually be a five stage or five transaction process to be able to do that and and something like that often in step kind of makes sense like you know you can you can go and do it manually if you want that's fine but but doing it on step I think makes a lot more sense so yeah cool things like that
really really cool. I was looking at the dashboard with my wallet connected, BraveWall connected by the way, as you were talking. And I loved, there's just so many options and things that you can do from within one dashboard. That's great. I really love what you said about not reinventing the wheel, not trying to do everything.
I'm a big proponent of you can do anything you want but you cannot do everything. So very important to prioritize what people actually won't, what people will actually use. But I just wanted to quickly comment on the NFTs section in the dashboard. It looks so nice. I mean the whole dashboard looks so nice. It's so clean, it's easy to understand. I think for anyone
even for people who aren't like huge into defy or super familiar with it. It's pretty straightforward. I love that, you know, I love the Causes tab that's so cool. You can go out and, you know, make donations to charities directly, nonprofits and Causes. But the NFTs tab, really cool how it displays like a list of all your NFTs.
It's got like a little image preview there. It's got the name of it. Super cool, super cool and and seemingly easy to use. I'm gonna have to play around some more and see what I can do here, but I love it. I think everyone should check it out. That's that's right to hear. Yeah, the NFT gallery was something that
So we initially started with the gallery and it was kind of like a basic place but now we've built it out with a lot more of the details for individual entities. So it might be like traits and stuff like that. And just on the NFT front, earlier this year, we grew out of DeFi.
That's sort of a bread and butter, that's what we know. But then the world just went ballistic on NFTs and we just didn't have that expertise in house. So we were talking to our friends at the time at Salana floor, which is the still is the largest NFT data analytics
We were using their APIs and building out into step and stuff like that. And then essentially we got discussing with them and decided that perhaps an acquisition is in place. So we acquired Solana Floor in the middle of this year and we're essentially
we've absorbed their team, they've come on board, really great people, and they are the ones who know about NFTs, right? So they're the experts. And essentially, there'll be a lot more stuff coming to the gallery next year. A lot of the insights that you might see on Salana floor will eventually
making their way to steps. So that's like charts showing you the floor price of a particular collection or a particular NFT over time or giving you like sniping opportunities to be able to go and snip the the rarest NFTs of a collection like when they're listed or stuff like that right. So a lot of those things are currently available on Salada floor
but we're going to be doing that plus a bunch more. But essentially, I'm just happy that we have the people which understand the NFT world on board now because if we had to drop everything and try and understand it ourselves, it just wouldn't be as good and we wouldn't know everyone and we wouldn't be able to have as big of an impact.
Yeah, I was a lot of players. You know, an awesome tool. I didn't know that you guys had acquired them. So that's awesome. Great. Oh, thank you so much. Yeah, it is amazing and yeah, everyone should check it out. And we got some more stuff coming with Salana Flora as well.
pretty soon. We want to turn in the Salana floor into a bit of an NFT media hub as well. So all of the news which is happening in the NFT world, you know, we want people to go to Salana floor for that as well. So if it's a collection doing a new thing or some new launch or whatever it might be, there'll be a news category there.
soon. So we recently hired some pretty cool people to work on the data side of that for us. So yeah, a lot more changes coming soon. We'll have to see if we can get the bat and animate an F2 on there. Let's go. Absolutely. Yeah. Let's go. Yeah.
Yeah, that's really exciting. I feel like there are so few places where you can kind of go and like get all the latest NFT news in one place. That's very exciting. But I think what you've done with the NFT integration looks really great so far. And I think, you know, adding in all the extra stuff that comes with the acquisition of Solana floors, you can bring
this over the top. It's going to be so cool. I can't wait to see what you guys do with it. So I have a question about your token. Why did Stepop to create its own token appropriately named Step? Yeah, absolutely. So a step is a token that, you know, all these things which I described before on the dashboard.
So whether it's auto compounding yield farms or settling transactions from the serum decks or now the the forks of the serum decks and there's a couple of other sort of areas as well Where essentially like if you press a button say swap there is a fee which is being charged and and that fee essentially
goes to step or would go to step. So they're revenue opportunities. And that's one way that we can keep the lights on and hire people. If everyone's coming to this page to look at stuff and do stuff and do actions essentially on the page, there should be some things which essentially lead to
some sort of revenue for the protocol. So the step token is really a way for people to share into that. So what happens is all of the revenue that that step makes, so 100% goes to an address, which is all in our docs, and then that address is used to buy a step, and then that step is distributed to people that are staking steps. So we have the stake button there.
and you can stack your step and you get a thing called xstep, which follows very much from xsushi if people are familiar from Ethereum land. What's going on there? Essentially, that's a sustainable way to provide an API, which is an API that's not based on emissions as well, which is super important. So it's real.
So if the protocol makes more revenue and people click more buttons and do more things, then the API number go up, which is great. And maybe that's more of an incentive for people to stake and people that stake have some sort of ownership in the success of step as well as a protocol.
So yeah, so that's the idea behind the token. It's a way to be able to do that. And yeah, look, I think it makes sense. And yeah, I think for us, it's also interesting. It's also a customer acquisition tool as well, because when we first launched the step token,
We had literally the same product, but once we launched the token, we had 4x more views on the website and on the platform as well. So I think it's also an interesting way to offer incentives to the community and get the word out and make sure that people know about the platform and want to use it and stuff like that. So yeah.
Yeah, I think those are three really good reasons to launch your own token revenue opportunity customer acquisition and way to offer incentive back to the community makes a ten of sense to me Are there any plans to move in the direction of a more traditional Dow, you know, and provide government governance to snap holders in the future?
Yeah, maybe in the future. So in our docs, we talk a little bit about this. So I think it's important for protocols to be dictatorships until proven that they can operate as something like a Dow and also something which makes sense as a Dow because a lot of things that I see with
on if the sky is green, but you can vote on the specific very tailored niche part of the protocol. And I think that's a productive use of doing things. So I think we will eventually move more towards that, but it's also got to have a lot of that sort of productivity stuff built in.
I think for now, while we're still building things out, we're still building out the data services and blah, blah, blah. Once we have enough of those, that makes sense for us to make the transition to some sort of governance. I think that does make sense. But for now, I think it's okay for the team to be a dictatorship and to set the direction.
So you need that. You need a strong team that wants a clear direction of things. And often, you know, what I've seen happening is, you know, when projects become doused too early, you kind of like, oh, you wake up in the morning and then you have a vote on what you're going to do. You don't want that. So, you know, so we have
We have a clear direction in mind that we want to take step and we got to execute on it. And that's what we want to do. So when we are satisfied with everything that we've executed on, great that we might move more in that direction. But for now, I think it's very important that we have a strong direction, strong team and everyone can watch our execution.
I think that's a very pragmatic approach and makes a ton of sense. When you mentioned, there are a lot of dows out there that just photon things makes people feel productive, but they aren't necessarily actually being productive or creating real value. It reminded me of the term busy work where you might spend your day answering emails
or attending useless meetings, which makes you feel productive but isn't actually that valuable. It's like kind of the same thing. So I think that's absolutely. You guys have a learning portal with guides and such that, you know, DeFi, movies can resource to start investing through the platform.
We do, yeah, so step-to-finance/learn. We've got a whole bunch of articles up there which gets people started and that comes back to our Be the Front page of Salana where, you know, if you're new for the first time or you're like, you see an NFT and you're like, cool, that's awesome, but how do I get started? Okay, how do I make a
it. Where do I go? Where do I get my soul? How do I swap? A lot of these different things we cover that. We also work with other projects in the ecosystem, a lot of our friends that we put out guides for using those kind of products or how they might work in step. So yeah, the loan portal I think is super interesting.
We want more educational content and yeah, that's kind of like a first step for people to get involved in the ecosystem. Very cool. Does your team create the guides or do you like source that information from the community? Do you have help from community members to put those resources together? Oh yeah, out to
team builds all of those. That's a lot of those guides responsible for it's a Gary Gainesler on Twitter not Gainesler as an the SEC commissioner but Gainesler for the lulls so yeah everyone should go follow him but yeah he's a part of our team that's made a lot of those guides.
That's very cool. I know you're putting together some questions in Notion before the spaces. Did you have anything you want to ask? Yes, I see that you have a partner in subfinance where you ask for community to
Both their ideas are there any ideas you'd like to highlight is I see a lot of them were actually implemented so we're like your top ones or ones that's to doubt you. Yeah so a lot of those have been implemented and probably will continue to be.
Some of the ideas yet to be executed on, so people want to monitor multiple wallets. So at the moment, right now, you can either connect your current wallet to step and then it will load all the stuff, or you can paste any Solano address into step and then it will load all the stuff happening with that wallet.
in one view rather than individually connecting one each time. So that's a much requested thing. Downloading, exporting, a transaction history, another highly requested thing that will be coming soon so you'll be able to get an Excel spreadsheet and it won't just be a bunch of
stuff which is unintelligible, it will actually make sense and it will say use scent, this much money to X or Y protocol, rather than going to a block explorer and just downloading a bunch of transaction ideas which doesn't really help that much. So stuff like that, big community requested things which will be coming soon.
There will be great for financial... My English is very bad today. I don't know what's happening. So sorry. For I asked for example in taxation, there will be a must for sure. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
There's also crypto tax companies that approach us and I want to do that. So yeah, we have the version one of the transaction history now. The version two has been in testing for a couple of months now, but it's almost ready. We just need to get the analytics product out and
and then we'll be pretty much good to go on the version two, which will have a lot more coverage of stuff. And then probably the version three sometime next year, probably like Q2, I'd say, that'll have like the Excel export and stuff like that. But there'll probably be an API available before then.
That sounds good. Another question. Are there any questions or suggestions that are a bit more abstract that you don't really know if they are possible within the desired next one, but might be feasible in the future or just overall very abstract ones that
>> That's a good question. We get people wondering into Discord with all sorts of different ideas. We have an ideas channel as well in our Discord, and I'll just take a look at it now. But yeah, look, we have people asking for multiple
multiple chain support as well. The the staked versions of different NFTs as well, that's another one that often comes up. Yeah, it's usually stuff like that, which people sort of want. But nothing too crazy and wacky, I don't think.
But I think as well just for us on supporting multiple blockchains. We think that it's better to be really good at one thing rather than mediocre at 10 things. And that's why we're sort of focused on just being really good at what we do on Salana.
50 other chains out there that we could go and integrate, but we wouldn't have as solid a connection to all of those and we would have to go and start up chat groups with a million other different projects and try and scale out the team and blah blah blah. So I think for us it just makes sense to do what we're good at.
just be really good at what we do on Solana and then yeah, you know, maybe there's other opportunities down the road where we can partner with other projects that might already offer certain functionality on other chains. I think that's probably the best pathway. It's like we give them Solana stuff and they give us say Ethereum stuff or something like that.
Yeah, one thing at a time. By the way, what's your discord?
The discord it's in if you just go to the step finance underscore on Twitter It's linked there. I don't have the address in front of me right now, but yeah if anyone just searches step finance and Twitter you'll see the discord link Awesome, thank you. There's some good questions here, and I think George this all comes back to
But I was thinking earlier about how you can do anything you want but you cannot do everything or you could try but you won't be able to do it all well So I think focusing on your niche is a really smart and again pragmatic approach to business So yeah, great job with that So what is what is steps main driving?
focus for the rest of the bear market as long as it might be or short who knows. Yeah so we last week we we hired another team member to come on board who's helping us out with Dana Dana analysis so one of the really cool things we want to do
is really get stuck into say like reports and providing a lot more content around data and really is just sort of getting the word out. So obviously that's also ties in with our new data analytics platform which will be going out to the public very soon so that'll be a source for it. But also just more broadly in general like I really
really like the Missouri reports, I think they're really good. And a lot of people subscribe to those kind of newsletters to just get that kind of information. We also have a step-data insights newsletter which we started a couple of months back to essentially kick off this process. And I mentioned as well the Salana floor news items as well.
they will also be focused on the data side with a lot of different things. So I think for us in the bear market, when people say building and that sort of thing, what do you actually mean? I think for us it's really building the core competencies of data and providing that content because if we have all of these different reports and articles
and newsletters and a platform that tells you all of this historical data. When the market does turn around eventually, we'll have all of that content there. If people rush back and they go, "Oh, let me have a look at this crypto thing again." They'll be able to see something that has a lot of existing prior content and historical information for
them to go through. So that's sort of where we want to get to and we just want to have a really solid platform that can do that and facilitate that and all of that content. So I think a lot of 2023 for us is just focusing on the content for the data. And also I should mention as well we with with Salana Flora on the
news kind of thing. We also are kicking off a conference with our friends as well in Turkey next year as well. So we have a thing called Salana Crossroads which we're doing essentially at step. And that's going to be, well, sidebar, actually one of, so, US is
the number one user base for step, it's like 23% of users, but right behind them is Turkey. And number two, I think is like Japan and then Thailand and then Vietnam and a bunch of other places. So a lot of non-English speaking content, right? And the question is like how much
in their own language. So that's what we're really focusing on with the conference as well as we want it to be open to build this from everywhere. And yeah, we're super pumped for that as well. So it's all part of the broader strategy of making sure that the content is out there, people know about the data, but also just informative about
stuff. We want to be that neutral place that can tell you like, "Hey, how are Dexas going?" or, "How many people are staking today?" That kind of stuff. A good example just quickly when Alameda blew up and stuff and people were saying, "Oh, they've got this or that much soul." We put out a newsletter article like
literally pointing to all the wallets and talking about it. The TLDR was that they didn't have that much soul and it was locked and all sorts of different other stuff. I think data like that really helps inform people and that can really change a lot of narratives in the space. Super important.
Amen to that. Are you seeking sponsors for this conference in Turkey? We are. Absolutely. We'd love to have the back brigade. Come on down. It's 31 March. So yeah, it'll be awesome.
Okay, that's awesome. Yeah, let's talk about this after the space is I know our event team is planning out sponsorship schedule for 2023. So yeah, let's talk about it. We got some some ambassadors that are in Turkey too.
Yeah, well, Turkey is a great spot because it's like 25 million crypto users literally like it's a massive Double digit percentage of the population have a crypto account and I remember speaking to the exchange CEOs there
earlier in this year. And they were saying they had a million user signups a month for multiple months in 2021. Insane. So just there is a huge community there. A lot of people doing stuff. And yeah, you want to bring all the builders there. So most welcome.
That's fantastic. And I saw on your website that you guys have like a data fund program for builders. Are you tying that into the conference too? Yeah, so that's actually what facilitated the acquisition of Solanaflow was the data fund and the idea behind
Yeah, the idea behind that is we have a pot of money that we've set aside to invest in offer grants for really cool data related projects on Salana. So that's our key focus and we have talked to and
talking to a bunch of different teams in the space. It's just so happens to Lana Floor was our first sort of big thing but yeah happy to do other stuff. Anyone who's building awesome data stuff definitely come to us have a chat and we'll see where things go.
Love seeing that support for builders in the space. Do you guys have a very active community? Yeah, so a lot of our communities on Discord. So if people want to hop in the step Discord, got a lot of people there, a lot of our regulars, which is really cool to see. I think that's something that's also
been really awesome to see a lot of this year. There's a lot of projects out there which maybe were a flash in a pan kind of thing right where you know the projects appear today and then they're gone tomorrow but I think the projects which are really good are the ones which stick around and they also are able to create a lot of you know really dedicated and excited people that are
always there for the long haul and we've been lucky enough to be able to foster that kind of thing. So yeah, we have a lot of great people in our community that help out in different ways as well. Spraying the word, we have a lot of, as I said, like different language channels as well. So we have people, you know, talking in different languages and we're helping people out, you know, using step and stuff like that, which#
That's excellent. I love to hear it. By the way, I pulled up your discord URL from your bio and I'll pin it or I'll tweet after the spaces and I'll pin it. But by the way, you guys can like create a URL for your discord that's like a little bit more readable. Because I think right now it's just like a string of random numbers and letters.
Yeah, like ours is dead or die 2g/battergate. So just tip, like if you want to give it out quickly, it's easier to give it like a more readable name rather than like PAB8WCH5.com. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, we totally need to do that all get on that right away. Awesome. Drew, did you have a question? Go ahead.
Yeah, just more of like a cut up personal question because I thoroughly enjoy NFTs probably more than I should and I know you guys do NFTs I was just curious if you are personally into NFTs and if you are
are if you might share and I'll which ones you like if you are if you're willing. Yeah man I'm a dinosaur can you see my PFP? Yeah I love the the clay the sores there's also another one the top
Pat Chicks, which was one of the original sort of OG ones in Salana that's been my PFP for a long time. I only recently became a dinosaur, but Top Hat Chicks was really cool. It was like chickens with a Top Hat and they had like branded for different projects and they had a step chicken so of course I had to have that one.
Of course, I also like the Pudgy Penguin crew on Ethereum as well. I went to the Pudgy Meetup in Singapore a couple of months back. It was awesome. I saw that. I always saw they had one. It looked really cool.
I mean, I'm not super huge on NFTs. I don't spend too much time in that world, but the ones that I do like, I really do like, and I think the main thing with NFTs is the communities that people build, and it's just a cool place to hang, and everyone's just positive and excited, and that's awesome. I love seeing that.
Yeah, I agree 100%. So, and then one other like, of course, I asked the guys we had on yesterday and yeah, I'd love to hear your take since you've kind of been around the crypto space for quite some time now.
like OG almost. So, you know, why do you believe so strongly in blockchain and crypto and those kind of things and after all these years, you know, like having that kind of insights where we're at now and where we're going.
and why you believe in crypto and blockchain for the future. Yeah, that's a great question. In fact, it's probably the most important question for anyone in crypto to ever sort of think about. And for me, it's been the same thing for the last 12 years. We need private money for the
world. We need an accessible financial system that is on the same level for everyone everywhere. It doesn't matter if I'm sitting in Turkey or New York or Uganda, like I should have access to be able to do the same stuff and there shouldn't just be random geographic barriers dependent on what patch
that I happen to be standing on. I think that's kind of a dumb system. It's an unfair system. And yeah, I think the real great thing about crypto is you can have a wallet and you can do everything wherever you are in the world and there's no geographical limitations. So that's what really gets me.
I think you must have been just you. Oh, okay. Sorry. Oh, good. Yeah, look, I think that's one of the key things, right, is just having that the ability to do everything that you might want to do in the financial world and not being reliant on geography. So that's always been the goal
ever since I got into crypto and that's what I was most excited about. And also when you think about the philosophy behind what is money as well, that's also another super important question because whatever people care about around the world, whether it's their kids' education or their health or what some politician saying, often it comes back to
money. But the thing is that people don't understand where the money comes from or anything like that. So I think crypto, all of this is public. You can see it. It's on a chain. It has limited supply. You can see where all the money is. You can't hide it or whatever. So I think these are also really good principles to be living by.
buy. That's what I want to see in the world. I've been through several savage bear markets where you go from something to total zero. I've made money and then I've lost my money three or four times. I've done different companies and different stuff in the C-Cusses
I bought my first, or mind my first Bitcoin at $1.70. So like I've seen a lot of stuff, right? And the main thing is if you have that philosophical take about why crypto is important, then you can weather any storm. And it doesn't matter. Because we're still moving forward. There's 200 currencies in the world. All of them are
a pretty terrible and I think that it's very unlikely that Fiat currency number 173 is going to make a massive breakthrough and everyone's going to adopt it, it's going to be the best thing ever. And I think the much more likely thing is when we have a common standard around the world to be able to measure value and measure time and I think that's crypto.
And that was a great response. I don't know if it was the first day, it was so well-worded. I've said it many times, man, and I think about it a lot. I figured having been in it so long, you'd have a good response. Sorry, I know we're about out of touch.
one quick question, sounds like you travel around a lot what's your favorite place to go to or that you've been to? Favorite place. That's a very difficult question. I think it's a pros and cons question. Right now I'm in Turkey on the Mediterranean. It's beautiful. I walk around the sun is shining. It's not even that cold. I
I was in London a couple of weeks ago, it was -2 and Celsius and it was snowing and it was horrible. But no, I like a lot of different places for a lot of different reasons. So yeah, look, Turkey, Mediterranean, awesome. We were in Portugal last month for the conference. Also a really cool place. You know, London and big cities are all very well and good.
I spent six years in Asia when I was in Hong Kong in my first start up. I also like going to Malaysia and Singapore. I've got friends there. Essentially, the important thing for me that I've learned, being a nomad for the last three years, essentially, I haven't
had a home has been that like it's actually the people that you spend your time with that matter. It's not about like I can climb up to a mountain and see a sunrise and go, "Oh isn't that wonderful? I've done that. I don't need to do it again." And also it's boring when it's just you. Like when you've done that for like the 12th time
Do you really need to go for the 13th time? Probably not. So I think it's important to do that with friends and people and loved ones and stuff like that. That's the important thing. So I kind of now just sort of optimise my life to make sure that I'm around those sorts of people and I can spend time doing that rather than going to all sorts of different crazy places.
Another great response and that's all I had Jenny. I'll let you take over again. No, that's perfect. Your questions have been so great. Thank you Drew. But yeah, I love that take. You know, what a privilege it is to be able to work or moat and travel the world, but ultimately at the end of the day, it's the people that you spend your time with that matters the most, you know.
I'm just echoing what you already said, but I love it. I believe that too. George, is there anything else that you'd like to share with the listeners in the back community today before we hop off? This has been great, by the way. Oh, look, it's been a pleasure. Look, nothing much from my side other than have a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year and
If anyone's interested in step, definitely come check us out on stepfinance on Twitter or step.finance as the URL. Come join the Discord, come DM us on Twitter if you've got any thoughts or comments on things. But yeah, it's been a pleasure and I love talking to the brave and the back community. It's awesome.
Definitely won't be the last space we do together for sure and we'll probably work together more hopefully Now that you guys have integrated the wallet and you've just been such a blast to talk to there are probably more things that we can do At least merge our communities who knows we'll figure it out, but thank you so much for being here
and for teaching us all about step finance and to everyone else in the audience even though we have a thin crowd today the crowd was strong the questions were good the discussion was great thank you all for coming you know it's always a delight being in the container with you all give it up for George and the back community team hosts for George
and gear, throw down some emoji reacts if you liked it. And let's see, follow everyone in the room that you want to stay connected with, George, step finance, the team. And we will be seeing you all next week on the 30th for a Spaces with Dar
Oh, and before we hop, I just want to mention that we also have some more holiday games happening in the back the Babbergate Discord today. We kicked off a holiday party a couple days ago and the games keep going over time. So we're doing more karaoke, more scribble, more footage today. So hop in there, discord.gg/
I wish everybody a happy holidays, happy new year, and again, thank you George. This has been so, so wonderful. - Awesome, all the best guys, have a great rest of the day. See ya. - Bye, good bye everybody. - Bye guys, thanks George. - See ya.