| Author(s): | @lftherios |
|---|---|
| Type: | executable org |
| Created: | 2025-11-28 |
| Status: | active |
| Request for Comments: | |
| Formal Review: | — |
| Submission: | — |
Overview
This is a Multi-Org proposal which is requesting a total of 2 994 000 USDC in funds for 2026.
This proposal outlines a unified ecosystem strategy for 2026. It brings together the proposals and budgets for the Drips, Garden, and Radworks app initiatives into a single proposal. It also provides a broader review of our ecosystem and the external landscape in which we operate in, offering a high-level perspective on our direction moving forward.
Radworks in 2025
From my perspective, this year closes with bittersweet feelings.
Starting with the good:
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Drips crossed $1M in ARR for the first time, moving closer to profitability and, more importantly, showing real potential to become the superapp for funding public goods. This is a big milestone—congratulations to the team!
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The Radicle protocol continued to run smoothly in the wild without major hiccups. 2025 was its first full year fully open, hosting more than 5,000 projects, enabling collaboration across thousands of nodes, and—most importantly—being driven forward by a passionate community of both paid contributors and volunteers. Among other things, this year brought the firt iteration of the long-awaited Windows support as well as canonical references that enable maintainers to define who can update specific branches/tags with threshold-based permission rules—something critical for decentralized governance and security. The protocol is becoming genuinely usable for mainstream developers while maintaining its decentralized, sovereign ethos.
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The overall ecosystem remained frugal, remained within budget and avoiding overspending, preserving optionality for the coming years.
Now, the not-so-good:
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Let’s start with the obvious: the token price. The RAD token—what all contributors of this ecosystem have in common—has been performing poorly. It had its worst year and desperately needs an update. With a growing ecosystem focus on revenue, there is a proposal to update tokenomics to reflect that here but more focus is required there.
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This year was also disappointing for Radicle Garden. Despite the team’s efforts, we didn’t manage to ship anything functional, and as a result, we didn’t learn much. Hopefully, this changes in December 2025 with the release of Radicle Garden so we can start the year fresh.
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Finally, the Radworks app team took longer than expected to hire, which delayed delivery. On the positive side, we advanced on the partnerships front, made a strong hire this month, and are now positioned to close the year on a high note.
The world in 2025
Most importantly, the world we operate in changed significantly in 2025.
Authoritarianism and the End of Privacy in the EU
Seven years ago, we anticipated growing institutional instability and rising geopolitical tensions that could put the open in open-source software at risk. That’s why we set out to build Radicle: to create a resilient, global, and durable home for FOSS—one that could endure regardless of political or institutional shifts.
Today, the reality for many in the West is marked by declining trust in institutions, challenges to the rule of law, and a broader crisis of democratic governance. War, violence, and fear are becoming increasingly normalised. At the same time, governments appear to be moving toward expanded surveillance capabilities—whether through initiatives like client-side scanning (e.g., “chat control”) or the development of a Digital ID and Digital Euro.
In my view, the foundational principles of a free society in the West are being shaken. Many people feel reluctant to speak up against state overreach, and that atmosphere inevitably affects everything we do.
The slow death of the public web
Another thing that stands out to me is the decline of the public web. Most people have already retreated into non-indexed, pseudo-private spaces where they feel more comfortable being themselves. Meanwhile, the public internet has become dominated by bots, semi-professional content creators, and increasingly by AI-generated content. Being visible on the public web now often feels awkward—crowded with spammers and scammers—and marked by a general sense of fear, as anything you say can be taken out of context or weaponized against you. I expect this shift to influence how we build software as well.
The rise of AI
AI is capturing everyone’s attention. People are both fascinated by its possibilities and concerned about its consequences, and public discourse is increasingly dominated by it. While LLMs may not be capable of true “thinking” yet, they already provide significant value—summarizing our collective knowledge and feeding it back to us in contextually useful ways.
Unfortunately, all of this comes with substantial risks. AI systems can serve you better the more they know about you, which is why major AI companies are beginning to build browsers—and soon—computers and personal devices. The next major battleground for personal freedom and digital autonomy will likely be fought there.
The software world has changed
The above deeply affects the way we build software. There are new dynamics in how we create and collaborate over software:
- A large part (likely already the largest) of FOSS code is now written by agents, instructed in human language.
- Some of the best engineers I know now work with many agents daily rather than crafting all their code alone.
- Small teams plus many agents are, in many cases, replacing larger teams. For corporate life, this already means less hiring and fewer juniors—one or two experts per topic. Unfortunately, it’s already looking ugly for employment.
- For open source, it’s even harder to predict what comes next, when AI trains on your content without any attribution and nationalists across the globe push for “closed” models on the road to nationalist super-intelligence.
- “Build your own software” is also taking shape. Projects like Nothing’s AI-native operating system or Wabi, but the tech is not fully here yet.
Some of my own speculations are shared below:
- The bazaar model will be challenged.
People will increasingly retreat into safer, semi-private collaboration spaces—places where they can trust that they’re interacting either with real humans (friends or friends-of-friends) or with systems that guarantee their interactions won’t be harvested for training or weaponized against them. What remains on the public internet will likely be reduced to:
a. anonymized, read-only modes of participation, or
b. collaboration spaces gated by social proximity, not pure openness.
- Secure software distribution will become a lot more important.
In a world where a large part of FOSS code is written by agents, focus moves from how software is collaborated on to how software is trusted once it leaves the repository. As code becomes cheaper and faster to generate, the real bottleneck—and the real risk—moves to the distribution layer: verifying that the binaries, containers, models, and modules we run are authentic, untampered, and traceable back to legitimate maintainers.
- Traditional forges will be challenged.
Quoting from Zed:
Collaboration is continuous conversation, not discrete commits. You can’t snapshot every clarification, every pivot, every back-and-forth that shapes the code. We’re building a system that captures this entire dialogue: every edit, every discussion, linked durably to the code as it evolves. This frees collaboration from the rigid structure of commits.
I do share the same view and I do believe that in this new environment, decentralized alternatives shouldn’t simply imitate their centralized counterparts—they should diverge meaningfully.
Our Strategy & Objectives for 2026
- Doubling down on privacy.
The Radicle protocol remains the only privacy-preserving and censorship-resistant protocol for code collaboration. I consider this an asset, so I am proposing that in 2026 the team should double down on those foundations—making the protocol even more resilient and making collaboration over private repos both:
a) much more user-friendly and simple, and
b) much more robust (likely introducing models for encryption at rest).
I am also proposing that we experiment with new local-first experiences and private workflows for small teams, reflecting today’s reality of software development, where collaboration increasingly involves both humans and agents.
For Drips, we should also explore what stronger privacy models could mean, though other priorities will take precedence in the short term.
- Doubling down on revenue and becoming fully self-sustainable.
Drips is already powering a diverse range of funding programs—including Stellar’s Wave, Filecoin’s RetroPGF, and the Ethereum Foundation’s Deep Funding— showing its versatility and growing market share. In 2026, we will continue adding new funding models to become the most complete solution in the industry while also expanding Drips with more AI-driven capabilities tailored to the needs of these programs, and build on our existing momentum to accelerate revenue growth.
Beyond Drips, a key objective for 2026 is for the Garden and Radworks app team to either become fully self-sustaining by year-end or adapt their approach to ensure their cost basis is directly supported. It’s an ambitious target from where we stand today, but Drips’ stability now allows me to personally focus almost all of my time on helping the Garden and Radworks app reach this milestone.
With the above in mind, I would like to propose a revenue target of crossing $3M in ecosystem revenue during 2026. This goal encompasses growth from Drips, new revenue streams from the Radworks app, and the initial monetization of Radicle Garden.
- Shipping and iterating with Garden and the Radworks app.
In December, we will soft-launch Radicle Garden—a hosted offering for always-on Radicle nodes that includes CI integrations among other things, something the our users has consistently requested. Once this release is live, we can finally move into an iterative development cycle driven by real user feedback, which is something we sorely lacked this year.
We also plan to ship the Radworks app—ideally in Q1—and go to market with some larger organisations we’ve been in discussion with. In parallel, we will explore partnerships with other forges and package managers that could benefit from using the Radicle network as infrastructure.
More broadly, the release of Garden marks the end of an era in which we’ve been catching up with core features offered by traditional forges. With that groundwork complete, we can now focus on attracting larger open-source communities that are increasingly looking for alternatives to GitHub, while also experimenting with new developer experiences.
- Updating the token model.
Finally, as outlined in an earlier Radworks Discourse post, a key priority for the ecosystem should be to align the RAD token more closely with real economic activity happening across our products. Expect more focus there in January 2026.
Budget Request Across All Orgs
Below I am sharing the requested budgets for each team in 2026.
For Drips, represented by the Public Goods Association and now led by @efstajas and Kat:
| Description | Amount in USD |
|---|---|
| Contributors (team of 9) | 1 406 190,06 |
| Events and Marketing | 236 373,37 |
| Accounting | 17 337,90 |
| Legal | 69 351,60 |
| Operations | 184 557,29 |
| Total Budget | 1 913 810,21 |
| Committed Income | - 1 020 000,00 |
| Request to DAO | 894 000,00 |
For Radicle Garden and the Radworks app, as one team now, led by @lftherios:
| Description | Amount in USD |
|---|---|
| Contributors (team of 8) | 1 628 026 |
| Marketing and Sponsorship | 34 660 |
| Operational Costs | 367 994 |
| Legal | 69 320 |
| Request to DAO | 2 100 000 |
Total funding requested for 2026 operations across orgs: 
2 994 000 USDC.
Finally, starting in January 2026, ongoing development of the Radicle protocol will be fully financed through the Better Internet Foundation. This separation allows Radworks to focus its resources on Drips, Garden, and the Radworks app, while ensuring that the protocol continues to receive dedicated, stable support from an aligned organization.
Long-Term Incentives for Drips Contributors
I am also proposing that we allocate 6.5M RAD to be fully locked until December 2026, with the intention of distributing it to all Drips contributors via linear vesting over the next four years (until December 2029). The rationale is identical to the one we used back in 2022 and incentivizes contributors with 1.5Ă— their annual compensation over 4 years in RAD.
The recent decline in the token price has created incentive challenges, and strengthening long-term alignment is essential. The Drips team has a proven track record of delivering meaningful value to the Radworks ecosystem, and providing stable, future-oriented incentives ensures they can continue driving the ecosystem forward. As other teams demonstrate similar impact and value creation, they should likewise expect comparable long-term incentive proposals in the years ahead.
Reporting
Every Org funded by this proposal will prepare a progress report (published on community.radworks.org) and present it at the quarterly Radworks Community Calls. This report will include year-to-date spend. These calls provide the information community members need to assess progress and determine whether an Org is still aligned with its proposal (and Radworks’ purpose).
Management of Funds
All Orgs included in this Multi-Org Proposal (Drips, Radicle Garden & Radworks App)—the “Grant Recipients” of Radworks, if this proposal is passed—hereby agree to:
- Use the amount granted by Radworks in support of fulfilling the purpose outlined in the “Purpose” section of their respective 2026 Plans (linked in the “Overview” section above). The Grant Recipients understand and acknowledge that the awarded amount may be used only for this purpose. Furthermore, any part of the grant that goes unused in the calendar year outlined in this proposal for 2026 will either be returned to the Radworks Treasury (by March 2027) or rolled over into and applied toward the Org’s 2027 grant from Radworks.
- Sign and adhere to the Radworks open-source licensing policy to (i) ensure Radworks’ funds are being used to support technologies that are open and aligned with Radworks’ purpose and (ii) enable a more accessible environment for software contributions across the ecosystem.