There have always been two parts to the Radicle vision:
- developing sovereign code infrastructure
- creating new value flows for developers to sustain their FOSS work
Today I am announcing the creation of a new core team called Radicle Funding that will focus on the latter. This core team will be responsible for the protocols and user experiences that will enable a more sustainable future for FOSS developers using Radicle.
This change affects how the Drips & Workstreams core teams organize, their strategy and their objectives moving forward. In short the Drips & Workstreams core teams are now one team. Hello Radicle Funding team.
The Drips Protocol
When we started the Drips team the core idea was to design and develop the core protocols that Radicle will need in order to execute on its vision for FOSS sustainability. Over the last year the Drips team has been executing on the above vision and I am happy to say that with our v0.2 release now ready for deployment, we now have all the pieces we need in order to realise the above vision.
The Drips protocol has been designed as a general purpose streaming and splitting protocol, as we always believed that more creators (beyond developers) can leverage it in order to fund their operations. As a result the protocol is and will remain of general purpose, agnostic of the applications that are being built upon it. But for the team, it’s now time for us to focus on the original problem we set out to solve ie the problem of FOSS sustainability.
Moving forward the Drips & Workstreams teams will start developing user experiences within app.radicle.xyz that leverage the Drips protocol in order to improve upon the FOSS sustainability problem.
MVP
We are still brainstorming on the what, but at the moment the leading idea is to design and develop an experience within app.radicle.xyz, built on top of the Drips protocol that:
- allows anyone to fund any FOSS project or developer in Radicle effortlessly (with one-off or recurring token payments)
- enables any project or developer to split any funds received with their FOSS dependencies and contributors programmatically and transparently.
The latter is an idea that we saw in action during the Drips v0.1 release with teams like Solidity, etherjs, BuildGuild and more. From our own research there was a lot of excitement around the idea of funding code dependencies, but the main problem we faced was the process of manually notifying dependencies, getting an Ethereum address and setting up splits configurations.
What we want to do with the Radicle Funding team is to automate the above process within Radicle. Our goal is to create a new cultural norm where projects and developers programatically and transparently fund their code dependencies using the Drips protocol.
A note on Workstreams
Since April 2022, another team within the DAO started developing Workstreams, a new application on top of the Drips protocol aiming to streamline the operations of the Radicle Grants program. The Workstreams team intends to re-frame Workstreams as a generic token streaming tool, fully decentralize its backend, and then launch it before moving on to support the development of the above-described MVP. The possibility of unifying the Drips and Workstreams apps is also currently considered.
What will the team own and maintain
- The Drips smart contracts
- The Drips landing page and application
- The Drips SDK and subgraphs
- Funding experiences within app.radicle.xyz (to be built)
- TBD the Workstreams application (currently discusssing the possibility of merging with the Drips application)
We will also continue our meetings weekly on Tuesdays at 16:00 CET to discuss our progress. The call is open for anyone interested in joining us.
Who is invovled
Using Discord handles below:
- @lftherios (team lead)
- @earthwindfirewater (research, subgraph development and general product management)
- @jtourkos (SDK and application development)
- @IgorZuk (smart contract development)
- @json (application development)
- @everett (application development)
- @manuel (smart contract development)
+@LukeF (helping from the growth side of things)
What comes next
The next few days we will be getting together in order to:
- Agree on an MVP
- Discuss the future of the Drips and Workstreams apps. A current idea we are exploring is to merge the two so there is only one app to maintain. We are currently comparing user stories there and try to make an informed decision.
- Discuss strategy & objectives for this newly formed team and share it with all of you.