Hello, ZK Nation!
It’s been really refreshing seeing you all execute on governance. Specifically, the work around Token Mechanics and Token Programs is really exciting to follow. Within that context, I wanted to introduce our work with Drips, as I think there might be some synergies between the two communities.
My name is Eleftherios, and I am the co-founder of Radicle, a privacy-preserving, censorship-resistant forge. Over the last two years, I’ve also been working on Drips, a toolkit that enables organizations to reward projects and individuals within their ecosystem. With over 250 projects onboarded, Drips empowers funders to efficiently allocate, manage, and distribute capital across a number of different use cases.
Drips enables flexible per-second payments, allowing organizations to stream funds continuously over time and split them among multiple recipients effortlessly. This creates a cascading effect, where recipients redistribute funds to others, amplifying impact. Notable funders include Protocol Labs, ENS, Scroll, and Octant (Golem Foundation).
At our core, we’re devs building tools for devs. If you’d like to dive deeper, feel free to check out our codebase and product to get a sense of how we operate and the vision driving our development.
Drips: A Tool for TPPs?
In our exploration of Token Program Proposals (TPPs) and Governance Advisory Proposals (GAPs), we’ve begun to see Drips—and specifically Drip Lists—as a powerful toolkit to bring these ideas to life.
Drip Lists as Money Routers
Within Drips, the canonical object is the Drip List, which functions like a “money router” that automatically splits incoming funds among multiple recipients at regular intervals. You can set up Support Streams that feed tokens into your Drip List, which can then direct value to multiple addresses, forming a flexible, cascading distribution network.
Adjustable Governance and Parameters
Each Drip List can have its own governance structure, allowing you to dynamically adjust recipients, modulate streaming rates over time, and even nest lists within lists—enabling complex, yet manageable funding flows. You could, for example, plug in onchain signals—like token price, volume thresholds, or other oracle-defined metrics—to automatically adjust how funds are distributed. This kind of adaptive tuning aligns well with TPPs, where programs evolve based on performance data and governance decisions.
Nested Structures and Cybernetic Loops
By nesting Drip Lists, you could treat each layer as its own discrete TPP, focusing decision-making on one stage at a time rather than grappling with a massive, all-at-once distribution. Each Drip List represents a different phase or module within a larger sequence, allowing delegates to concentrate on a single, well-defined set of parameters. As conditions change, each nested list can be adjusted based on feedback loops, aligning closely with cybernetic governance principles—where the system continually learns, adapts, and refines its processes.
Integrating With GAPs
GAPs, being fully on-chain and programmable, can directly interface with Drips. Governance decisions can automatically trigger changes in token flow, enabling a truly adaptive environment. Using @drnick framework “A Simple Decision Framework: STOP, PAUSE, CONTINUE, ITERATE” you can quickly adapt to new information:
- STOP: If a Drip List hits a predefined limit (like a token cap), it ceases automatically, needing no extra intervention.
- PAUSE: If conditions suggest you should wait (e.g., token price or market conditions aren’t ideal), slow or halt streams temporarily until they improve.
- CONTINUE: If targets are met, just re-initiate the Drip at the same parameters, maintaining consistency.
- ITERATE: If feedback suggests changes, tweak the parameters (e.g., shorten the epoch, increase/decrease amounts) and run another cycle.
In essence, Drips provides a modular, flexible framework for implementing token mechanics that adapt over time. It aligns with cybernetic governance principles, making it a good fit for creating transparent, scalable, and feedback-driven token programs.
How Different Organizations Use Drips
Retroactive Funding with Filecoin
Filecoin is leveraging Drips to distribute over $2 million for FIL-RetroPGF-2 in January 2025. They were drawn to Drips due to its seamless user experience for distributing funds to a large group over time, and the broader impact enabled by the Drips graph. For Protocol Labs, this meant supporting around 100 projects, many of which further redistributed funds to their dependencies via Drips, amplifying their reach and impact.
Deep Funding with Vitalik Buterin
As part of the Deep Funding experiment currently conducted by Vitalik Buterin, fund distributions will occur via Drips. Drips also provided the team with valuable data for dependency assessments—essentially acting as a training dataset to better understand and optimize funding flows over time.
Distributing Grants Over Time with ENS
ENS adopted Drips for a straightforward yet impactful use case: streaming $50,000 in grants to ecosystem projects over six months. Through Drips’ dependency funding mechanism, more than 40 projects were able to access this capital, significantly amplifying ENS’s contributions to the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) ecosystem.
Hackathon Voting & Distribution in LatAm with Scroll
Scroll used Drips to facilitate a collaborative voting process for ETH LatAm and the Ethereum Argentina Hackathon. Over 2,000 community members were invited to participate in gas-less voting to select their favorite hackathon projects. This ensured a fair and democratic allocation of rewards. The funds were then seamlessly distributed to the winners, creating an integrated experience for both voting and reward distribution.
If you’re thinking about launching a new token program, let’s connect. I would love to collaborate and share ideas!