Step Finance, a Solana-native decentralized finance protocol, announced the completion of a private token sale for $2 million, which will help build and develop its platform.
The round, disclosed on Tuesday, saw participation from notable Solana backers including Alameda Research, the hedge fund known for launching and backing FTX and Serum. Other investors include Raydium, One Block, 3 Commas Capital, Solidity Ventures and some undisclosed individual investors within the Solana ecosystem.
Step Finance is a DeFi position manager and aggregator, offering similar functionality to Ethereum’s Zapper. George Harrap, co-founder of Step, explained the current issues the project is trying to solve:
“The biggest problem in the Solana ecosystem is how most projects are siloed from one another. There is no way to know your token and LP balances, current position sizes, etc., without actually visiting each website individually and logging in to understand your portfolio — and performance.”
The Step Finance project emerged from the Solana hackathon held in March in collaboration with Serum. Though the project did not win any prize during the event, it appears to have provided the team with the necessary experience to pursue further funding. Harrap added:
"It’s hard to track anything on Solana because what Step is doing doesn’t exist yet, so there is a clear market fit that investors saw. Our team is made up of known people in the crypto industry who have raised money, built projects, companies, and start-ups, and the investors knew that their money was in safe hands."
Beyond the position and yield aggregation, the platform also seeks to provide insight into the user’s portfolio risk through parameters like the Sortino score. The platform is primarily meant for power users in Solana DeFi, where projects generally focus on more traditional trading platforms.
Solana is making a powerful push toward onboarding the “accessory” projects that simplify the use of other DeFi protocols. In the latest Hackathon, winners also included projects that emulate the functionality of platforms like Synthetix or Yearn.finance, in addition to unique additions such as tax reporting management.