“My belief is the user experience of the internet is broken, but it doesn’t have to be that way,” says DRiP co-founder and CEO Vibhu Norby. He’s part of a generation of founders building a better way with web3 tech. “Solana is really the foundation of a new internet,” he says. “One that is owned by the people and by the apps and the things that are using it and that are built on top of it.”
DRiP is an app for earning free collectibles like music, art, videos, and more from your favorite creators. DRiP sends millions of NFTs for free to collectors all over the world — something only possible on Solana — and it has grown into one of the most popular apps in all of web3.
“I think everything on the DRiP platform is really about helping you discover and be inspired.”
Here’s how DRiP works: You log in the app and start subscribing to creators that you like. In return, they give you their best work. And you own it. Digital media on DRiP spans the full spectrum of internet art — from illustrations, pixel art, and photography to news, podcasts, and even prank videos and live music streams.
“We want you to be able to find things that you're going to fall in love with,” says Norby. “The collectibles are NFTs. They are nonfungible tokens. When you own it, you can keep it, you can share it, you can trade it, you can sell it, you can buy it, you get the full economic expression that we have in the real world, but on the internet.”
DRiP creators earn directly for every like and subscriber. “On DRiP, we have a concept called ‘droplets,’” Norby explains. “When you subscribe to a creator, you're giving them a couple droplets per month to receive what they're making. It’s seamless. It’s instantaneous. It’s guaranteed. When you add that up across tens of thousands of fans, it becomes real income for them, it becomes meaningful. And that's something you don't get from traditional content platforms.”
Compression basically allowed DRiP to exist. Without Solana compression, DRiP isn't possible.
At the core of what Solana makes possible for DRiP is accessibility. “We needed to figure out a way to make these collectibles much more affordable, so that we didn't have to charge users,” Norby explains. With innovations that make NFTs affordable to mint and transact over a network that’s efficient and robust, using Solana helps DRiP turn consumers into collectors all over the world, and helps creators earn from their work without sacrificing their revenue share, creativity, or freedoms.
In particular, the Solana network’s compressed NFTs helped unlock DRiP’s potential. It’s a technology that reduces the cost of minting NFTs to fractions of a cent. “Compression is an amazing feat of engineering and ingenious design. It was a game changer for us,” says Norby. “When we were trying to send millions of NFTs per week, it started to stack up. Now, for every million in collectibles we send out, we're not spending more than several hundred dollars, instead of several hundred thousand dollars. Compression basically allowed DRiP to exist. Without Solana compression, DRiP isn't possible.”
For this emerging generation of Solana builders, the north star is creating an internet that serves the people who use it. “The most important thing on the internet for most people is the content. It's the things that are entertaining us and adding culture to our lives, and that are made by our friends and the people that we love,” says Norby. “I think that we are going to be a part of the solution to that, and the internet will never be the same again.”
DRiP is only possible on Solana.
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