Q1 highlights
Launched Drips Wave with our new partner, the Stellar Development Foundation, attracting over 1000 developers to the Stellar open source ecosystem in Q1. See more below.
Upgraded the Drips Protocol to use Lit Protocol proofs for claiming off-chain identities.
Onboarded Unicef as a new partner for funding public goods.
New hires: Kat Young joined us in a broad leadership position in late 2025, and Ugonna Dike joined us early this year as our first dedicated Community Manager.
Introducing Drips Wave
Wave is our latest entirely new product: A contribution bounty platform that allows ecosystems to incentivize growth of their open-source landscapes. Drips organizes a monthly “Wave”, in which thousands of contributors receive “Points” for solving issues curated by independent open-source maintainers. After each Wave, a reward budget is split with contributors based on the amount of points they earned.
Today, we’re already starting our fourth Wave for our partner Stellar – after already onboarding over a thousand new developers to their open-source ecosystem in Q1. In total, over 30.000 individual PRs have already been merged as part of the Stellar Wave Program.
Read more about Drips Wave in our docs.
News from the Public Goods Association
Our legal entity, the Public Goods Association, has shuffled up its board of directors in Q1. Kat Young is now the President, I (Jason Efstathiou) am Vice-President, and Ioannis Tourkogiorgis remains as a signatory. The PGA also now has a little website
Budget Overview
Drips Wave is yielding significant revenue for the org, already roughly covering monthly personnel cost. The sprint to launch the new product and handle ongoing Wave operations did result in ending Q1 over-budget, mainly driven by overtime of key contributors and increased infrastructure cost – but we expect to offset this with additional revenue streams and reduced costs later in the year as the Wave program settles into a more predictable rhythm, and infrastructure investments start paying off.
Looking Ahead
- Expanding the Stellar Wave: Wave 4, launching today, has a significantly larger reward budget than previous ones. We look forward to enhancing the Wave platform with new features, onboarding new contributors and maintainers, and deepending our relationship with Stellar.
- Launching new Wave Programs: We are actively pursuing multiple promising leads towards launching more Wave Programs with additional partners.
- Filecoin RPGF-4: Apart from Wave, Filecoin is gearing up for their next major RPGF round on Drips, for which preparations on our end are now underway.
- Automating Wave Operations: As a brand new program with still ever-changing dynamics, Drips Wave currently requires a significant amount of operational resources month on month. We have already succeeded in and will continue to automate large parts of this using AI and other custom-built systems, in turn freeing up the team to pursue new features and additional bets.