Step Finance, a trading dashboard born out of the Solana hackathon, received $2 million in funding from Alameda Research, 3 Commas Capital and more.
Its investors are betting on Step Finance emerging as the “front page” of the high-throughput Solana blockchain. The Solana ecosystem is backed heavily by Sam Bankman-Fried, Alameda’s CEO.
Other participating investors included Raydium, One Block, Solidity Ventures and a number of private individuals connected to the Solana ecosystem, according to a press release.
The firm said the funding will be used to build the Step Platform, which will allow users to visualize, analyze, execute and aggregate transactions across all Solana contracts. It’s a tool similar to Zapper and other products in the Ethereum ecosystem that make it easy to understand your investments.
The Solana Foundation raised $40 million from a pair of crypto exchanges last month in a bid to fund more software development on the network. While Ethereum users have suffered from high fees caused by blockchain congestion, Solana is said to have transaction speeds that rival traditional financial networks. Boosters of Solana and other base layers see now as the time to attract new users.
"The biggest problem in the Solana ecosystem is how most projects are siloed from one another,” said George Harrap, the Step Finance co-founder who formerly helmed remittance startup Bitspark.
“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,” he said. “Step was born out of this necessity and is here to solve that.”