Hi Everyone!
This is the monthly update from the Drips Team for June. June has been a challenging but also very productive month for our team as we continue to move towards shipping Drips v0.2. Essentially, in addition to continuing to do important work on security, optimization and better tests, we also realized this month that there were several important “nuts and bolts” features that we really wanted to include in v0.2 of Drips. These features are technically challenging, but also (we believe) very important for developers, and will be important differentiators versus other Ethereum streaming protocols if we can pull them off!
We also have a new team member, @jtourkos who has joined our team this month and who has already made some great contributions to the Drips JS SDK. Welcome Ioannis!
Progress This Month
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Completed R&D for “Squeezing Drips” – a new feature that will enable funds Dripped to users to be collectable any time, even within a cycle, which means Drips v0.2 will be optimized for both n:1 and 1:1 streaming use cases. All other Ethereum streaming protocols so far are only optimized for 1:1 streaming, so if we can get this into v0.2 it will be a big win.
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Completed R&D for adding higher decimal precision to Drips v0.2. Addressing decimal precision correctly is an important issue that was pointed out by the LlamaPay team which we were not aware of before this month and which some streaming protocols do not handle correctly. As an example, USDC only has 6 decimals of precision, which can lead to issues if not handled carefully.
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Made many improvements to the Drips Javascript SDK, including adding unit tests, better error handling and refactoring the main types for a significantly improved developer experience.
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Added many optimizations to the DripsHub codebase which will reduce gas for developers building on Drips, as well as end users.
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Continued security audit work on the DripsHub codebase.
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The team also spent some time discussing our medium-term vision for Drips, our roadmap for the next 6 month or so, as well as how we want to position Drips versus other streaming protocols in the space. The result of that visioning is that we still believe that Drips v0.2 has the opportunity to be the best overall streaming protocol in the space, so we will focus 100% on shipping the core steaming protocol first and look to add support for NFT memberships later this year. The features that we feel most distinguish Drips from other streaming protocols are:
- Gas-optimized for both n:1 and 1:1 streaming
- Support for scheduled Drips (pre-defined start and end times for streams)
- No wrapped tokens – users can stream any ERC-20 token natively
- “Hub Identities” offer tremendous flexibility to end users and dapp developers looking to build on top of Drips
- Integrated protocol for Splitting
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Despite some challenges it has been a huge month and I’m feeling super inspired by this incredible team and we’ve really advanced our understanding of what is possible in a streaming protocol. Thanks so much to everyone on the Radicle Team and our community for your support during this last push to v0.2!