How Drips Is Different

You might be thinking,

This sounds a lot like Github Sponsors or Patreon. Does the world really need another sponsorship solution for membership-based funding?

The answer is YES. Here’s how Drips is different from anything else like it:

Crypto-Native

100% DeFi Rails – Web2 solutions like Github Sponsors and Patreon require users to have real world bank accounts or credit cards to receive or send funds. With Drips, the only requirement is an Ethereum account to raise funds or support a project.

Trustless – Maintainers can set up projects on Drips without trusting companies, governments, or anyone else. Funds can never be embargoed and communications to supporters cannot be censored. For example, organizations like Wikileaks could raise funds using Drips if they wished.

No Lock-In

Application-Agnostic – Drips is built on public Ethereum contracts and ordinary ERC-721 NFT membership badges. Users can interact with these components using whichever wallets and tools they prefer.

Protocols, Not Platforms – Using the Drips protocol doesn’t lock users into any one platform the way that Kickstarter and Patreon do and Drips does not depend on other parts of the Radicle ecosystem or tools. You can raise funds on Drips for a Github-based project if you want to, or even for a creative project entirely unrelated to code.

Extensible – Drips is 100% open source software built on open standards. The Radicle team has created a web-based front end as a default, but users can just as easily create their own, or even call the smart contracts directly from code.

New Ways to Engage Community

Members-Only Discord – Maintainers can (optionally) offer supporters gated access to private channels in Discord, governed by supporters’ NFT membership tokens, using a Discord bot developed by Collab.land.

Snapshot-Based Polls – Maintainers can also choose to set up a Snapshot space where supporters can use their membership NFTs to vote on topics like roadmap decisions and prioritization of issues.

Gated Issues Trackers – (Coming soon!) Future versions of Drips will support tighter integration with Radicle Upstream, which will allow maintainers to provide gated access to private issues trackers for their supporters.

Gated Branches – (Coming soon!) Similar to the gated issues trackers, future versions of Drips working with Radicle Upstream will even allow maintainers to give supporters gated access to private branches in the project’s repository, which could contain pre-release versions of code, or any other private content the maintainer can imagine.