Dapps are in a sense like banks. Although they perform much more, the key touch-point is most Dapps is financial transaction, much like a bank.
As a user deposits across different banks, they would need to maintain different record [passbooks]. How do you collate these passbooks or records on different Dapps?

That is where a portfolio tracker/ dashboard like Step Finance comes in. For Solana it's the main pass book- showing you your portfolio token balances, AMM LPs, yield farms and more. Essentially all your investments across Solana are visible.

But The Step Ecosystem is a lot more- extending from just a portfolio dashboard to a dashboard for the ecosystem, news, research and a lot more.

That’s what I’m going to explore in this piece- starting with the main product- the dashboard for your wallet. [Being a frequent user on Solana, this is for particular interest for me]

Step Finance [Your Dashboard for Solana]

When you open the Step Finance dashboard, the first thing you need to do is connect your wallet [Phantom, Backpack or any other wallet on Solana].

This page shows you positions in your Solana wallet. Essentially, you can see the assets in your wallet and their amounts, your NFTs, the value of yielding positions, balances, and more. One more cool thing is, you can claim your farming rewards directly from the Step dashboard, or compound the yields.

The Step Finance Page allows you to do a lot more too.

You can undertake swaps directly within the app without going to another DEX. Easier and convenient to swap through the app than going to another DEX once you disover that old memecoin that’s worth something [the dream of every Solana user, really.]

You can also see all the past history of your wallet on Solana in the transaction history page. Pretty essential to have that first look available before digging into SolScan.

You can see all the NFTs you own under the NFT Gallery section of the website.

I do like the other DeFi options which are available; especially the accounts dashboard which shows you tools to reclaim SOL paid to open order account on a DEX for a particular accounts [got back about 10 dollars from this- thanks for this Step Team].

You can stake Stake STEP to receive xSTEP. xSTEP in a sense is a claim on STEP staked in the staking vault. Over time, the Step Finance protocol generates fees from people using Step products and these fees are sent to the vault.

You can also stake your SOL with Step Finance’s Validator for a nice 7.161% APY.

Step DAO [Rewarding the community]

Community is crypto. There are a ton of articles I can link about this from top crypto VCs; but it’s something I see on an everyday basis. In discord servers where degens rally behind a meme. And the meme becomes stronger than ever.

The strongest communities are those that win in crypto. BONK is the perfect example of this.

Beyond airdrops, there should be a way for community members to be rewarded.

For community members to meaningfully add value to the project and get rewarded for it.

The Step DAO is the go-to place for this-with various bounties from social media to community to even translations [and more]. Folks from the Step Finance community can participate in these bounties and get rewarded with STEP tokens.

Step Analytics [The Ecosystem Dashboard]

Step Finance isn’t kidding when they say they are the front page of Solana. They truly are. Step Finance shows you your wallet’s presence on the ecosystem. Step Analytics shows you what’s popping in the ecosystem.

The Yield farmer isn’t ignored- on the DeFi on Solana page, you can find the farms with the most yield to optimize your capital to the fullest, like a true optimizoor would.

Solana Floor [Top-tier news and insights for the degens on Solana]

With meme-coins and telegram trading bots capturing the interests of fellow degens, a place was essential to provide the best news and insights on NFT, DeFi and the space to the traders of Solana.

This where Solana Floor Comes in.

Also the Floor name is not without the meaning degens first think of. Solana Floor does show you the floor prices of your top NFT collections be it Tensorians or Mad Lads.

You can also get a view of the entire market through a visual dashboard.

Interested in SNS domains stats? Solana Floor’s got that too.

Step Data Insights [Research Information]

The Step Data Insights newsletters provides deep dives on Solana’s use cases to airdrop alpha- a place for some research insights on narratives in the Solana Ecosystem.

They definitely are capturing all narratives- such as points programs across protocols [mainly perps platforms]- whose dashboard every trader is trying to scale with more volumes. This is an excerpt from their Solana DeFi summer 2.0 piece.

Solana Allstars [Rallying the community]

Solana Allstars is a physical meetup that is held twice a month in cities across the globe. It is focused on educating and bringing in new users to the Solana ecosystem (and the Allstars partner products).

Solana’s got a massive community across the globe [just see in how many cities the SuperTeam ecosystem call is hosted, and you’d get a glimpse].

The Solana community is the Step Finance community because at the end of the day, Step is built for the Solana user. Binance had their angels program- and Step is building the angels for Solana- Allastars.

Solana Allstars too is a testament to that community with 6000+ attendees across all the meetups conducted till now. More meetups this year, and more attendees are expected [the number of Phantom Wallets have been on the rise, haven’t they?]

Solana CrossRoads [Gathering of the community]

Solana conferences are truly something [I’d attended the first Solana Hacker House in Bangalore back in the day, and the energy was truly crazy].

Solana CrossRoads is happening this year in Istanbul Turkey on May 10th and 11th [And I believe the energy will be something similar].

It’s the largest Solana conference so I believe the energy might be magnitudes more crazier- you might have to go there yourself to experience it.

It’s a conference focused on high-growth markets and Turkey’s in that sense a perfect place [given the mass adoption of USD stablecoins/crypto for payments].

The Next Billion Podcast [Bring new folks to the community]

Bring the next billion users to crypto is a phrase that you hear often, but hardly see in practice. Step Finance however does it with their Next Billion podcast; on which they take on discussions with leaders and builders in the crypto space. Go give it a listen whether you’re a degen or someone new to the space.

How everything ties together, and what excites me

With the Step Ecosystem of products, what I see is vertical integration [and that’s the best thing]. An end to end array of products to serve all your needs on Solana as a trader from information to a platform to trade that information on [Swaps].

Amazon started off selling books. But they didn’t become Amazon because they sold books. They became Amazon because they sold everything - they evolved into the everything store.

Step Finance is evolving into that everything store for Solana; from just a portfolio tracker/ dashboard to a DEX to a place to stake STEP, a place to stake SOL, a place to see news and analytics [Step Analytics, Solana Floor], to a place where you can read deep dives on narratives in the ecosystem [Step Data Insights newsletter] to even a place where you can listen to conversations from top leaders in the space [ The Next Billion podcast].

What I also like is how the community’s been mobilized.

StepDAO provides community members a way to add value to the project and earn. Solana CrossRoads and Allstars are a way to rally the community in real life [Allstars being the ambassador program with frequent meet-ups versus the larger conference that you need to bring everyone together, that is CrossRoads].

An everything store for Solana, with the community support behind is one that I too can definitely rally behind.

That’s why I’m bullish on Step Finance and the Step ecosystem in general.