Hey everyone!
“I Drip You Drip We Drip”.
It was just about one year ago now that we launched V1 of the Drips protocol on Ethereum mainnet. And now here we are a year later and very close to launching V2. 
With the last of the security work wrapping up in the next two weeks, in January the Drips team has started looking ahead and has been placing more focus on the crowdfunding experiences we plan to build for developers on top of V2 of the protocol. We’re super excited about what is cooking and will be announcing many more details in the coming weeks. But for now, read on for an early taste, as well as a progress-update on the protocol itself.
Crowdfunding Explorations
Drips V1 blended a gas-efficient Ethereum protocol for streaming with a web3-native social network that included crowdfunding tools for creators. So far, with Drips V2, we’ve focused most of our efforts on making major improvements to the streaming protocol, but with the protocol ready to ship, the team has been getting super psyched about the experiences we can build on top of V2’s powerful new funding primitives. Here are some of our explorations so far:
Drips V2 Crowdfunding Direction considers the possibility of building a Drips V1-style crowdfunding experince on top of the Drips V2 protocol, but with much more of a focus on FOSS developers and funders.
Drips V2 Strategy Reflections here @lftherios proposes a design sprint that would explore building crowdfunding features into V2, but with a much greater focus on the users who are funding/spnsoring rather than the users who are raising funds.
Gitcoin Passport Integration for Social Linking explores how an integration with Gitcoin Passport could allow Drips V2 users to create verifiable links between their social identities and their crowdfunding profiles in Drips.
V2 Crowdfunding in the Drips App (Figma) is a visual exploration of how we could add funding experiences directly into the Drips V2 webapp, similar to what we shipped in Drips V1. This got us so hyped! Amazing work once again by @json, @everett and @brandonhaslegs on bringing such incredible app experiences from imagination to reality so fast.
NOTE: all of the above is still very much in the “exploration” stage and should be taken with a big grain of salt. We are sharing our work here to give the community a sense of the possibilities and our excitement, rather than presenting a specific roadmap or concrete plan.
V2 Protocol - Progress This Month
Meanwhile, work also continued on the protocol front…
Drips V2 Smart Contracts
- The contracts are up to deployment #9 on the Goerli testnet, with more polishing and improvements completed by @igor.
- This month @lftherios and @manuel continued their work on launching two different bug bounty programs for the Drips V2 smart contracts.
- The first of these will be a 10-day Code Contest on Code4rena, which kicks off this week.
- You can learn more about the various efforts around security for Drips V2 on the Security page in the Drips V2 docs here.
Drips SDK
- This month, @jtourkos made a very significant improvement to the robustness of the SDK with the addition of the first batch of integration tests!
- With help from @json, @jtourkos has also continued to improve the query-related capabilities of the SDK for retrieving information about current Drips, Splits and balances to developers.
Drips Webapp
- The app now includes a first version of squeezing Drips! Amazing work by @json on a feature that is both highly technical and came with major UX challenges as well. We would love to hear what folks out there in the community think if you have a chance to give it a try.
Drips V2 Docs
- We’ve added a whole new docs section specifically about the Drips App, also authored by @json (who completely killed it this month, if you haven’t noticed by now)
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ETH Denver 2023
We’re starting to prepare for ETH Denver next month and can’t wait to connect with everyone out there in the extended community.
I’m planning to give a talk at Schelling Point about Drips V2 and will also be speaking on a panel with someone from the incredible Ceramic team (thanks @Lfada ). More details about our ETH Denver plans will be announced soon, but if you will be there and would like to meet up or hang out, please get in touch on Discord!
Can’t wait! In the meantime, as always thanks for reading and for continuing to be here with us. 