Hey friends!
This month I’m writing our community update from the lovely Chautauqua historic lodge in Boulder CO, where the Gitcoin team has facilitated a truly magical gathering of folks working on web3 solutions for supporting public goods. It has been inspiring to meet so many thoughtful and purpose-driven people from our extended web3 community. So, as always, a huge thank you to Gitcoin for continuing to organize the best events in web3 and for all that you do to support us!
Meanwhile, in the world of Drips, there’s a lot happening as well. The biggest news this month is that moving forward, Drips will likely have the opportunity to focus more on developing its own organizational identity and brand.
This comes at an exciting time, because with the C4A contest now complete, we are just a days away from being ready to deploy the Drips V2 smart contracts to Ethereum mainnet. Our plan is to “soft-launch” the Drips V2 contracts this month, while continuing to conduct user interviews. These user interviews will, in-turn, inform the specifics of the crowdfunding experiences we will roll out in the Drips V2 Webapp over the coming months.
With that in mind, if you are a FOSS developer interested in crowdsourcing funds, or an organization interested in funding FOSS development, we would love to speak with you!
And for those who are more interested in the nuts and bolts, here are some of the specific things the Drips Team accomplished this month:
Smart Contracts
- @igor and @manuel had their hands full this month with the Code4Arena contest, where hundreds of auditors from the security community contributed to a search for bugs and potential enhancements to the Drips V2 smart contracts.
- We’ll be sharing the full results from the contest soon, but the TLDR is that the contest was a huge success and the Drips Team is very grateful to all of the auditors who participated, as well as the awesome team at C4A for bringing so much attention to the code.
- We also received complements from a number of the auditors on the overall code and documentation quality. Kudos to Igor and Manuel for that
Subgraph and SDK
- @jtourkos has continued to add a number of important technical improvements (e.g. 1, 2) to the SDK, which in turn unlock more and better user experiences we can offer in the webapp.
- Going forward, @jtourkos and Jason will be taking over development of the subgraph. So expect major improvements on that front as they bring their superior Typescript skills to bear.
Drips V2 Webapp
- @efstajas has been crushing out huge improvements to the Drips webapp this month as usual in preparation for the V2 launch. Just this past week, he shipped a first look at a native support for Gnosis Safe in the app, which should offer major UX improvements for Safe users. Jason also upgraded the app to run on Sveltekit V1 this month, as well as continuing to ship major improvements to the balance estimation logic with help from @jtourkos . Super impressive progress on the app again this month!
- The whole Drips Team also spent a significant amount of time this month working through a product design exercise around the question of whether crowdfunding experiences in the app will focus on projects or individual devs or both, along with how to represent these types of user profiles in the protocol’s data model. This process was a challenge at times for our team, but in the end we came to consensus around a design that we believe will offer a good UX for both projects and devs to crowdsource funds using Drips. Keep your eye out for these features, which will be coming soon!
User Interviews
- For some time, @lftherios has been advocating for us to get much closer to our users (and prospective users) to ensure that the product experiences we are building are grounded in real data about their desires and needs.
- The team was all in agreement and this month for the first time we embarked on a systematic effort to connect with prospective users on both the funding and fund-raising side. @Lfada has been leading this work and has done an amazing job of setting up interviews with some impressive individuals and teams in the space in a very short timeframe.
- We’ve already had some big insights from the 4 interviews we’ve done so far (including the ESP team from the Ethereum Foundation and Richard Moore of Ethers.js) in just the last few weeks, so this is definitely something we will be continuing to invest time into over the next few months. Great work @Lfada and super excited for the next interviews!
- If anyone out there reading this is either a funder of open source projects, or an open source dev looking to raise funds to support their FOSS work, please get in touch. We would love to speak with you!
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Whew! I think that’s a wrap.
But the final note for this month is that – as mentioned at the start of the post – there are a number of us Radicles here in Colorado getting ready to roll to ETH Denver later today, including @shelb_ee , @Lfada , @sean and @bcccrmr with @abbey joining later in the week as well.
So if any of you out there in the community are attending and are interested in meeting up, please get in touch – we would 
to connect in person here in Denver!