We’ve been trying to find the right way to fund Drifty — a DEX designed to solve the impermanent loss problem while allowing 100% hands-free liquidity provision.
The problem is: we couldn’t find a funding path that felt right.
Developer grants were a strong model because they supported milestone-based building. You could get a little bit of money to start building, then get a bit more to continue and eventualy you would have a project ready for public and endorsed by the Foundation. But the grants are paused indefinitely.
SNS exists, but in the current market it doesn’t feel like a realistic fit for early-stage products. It is a decentralization engine, its intended use is to raise the whole sum at once and you have to have a working proven product, before you do that. It also carries reputation issues - very few projects launched via SNS are present right now in the ecosystem.
There is ICVC, but it seems like they only funded two projects by now: one of them is now 2 years late to their published roadmap.
There are also private investors, whales. But we simply don’t have access to them and it seems like there are very few of them in the ecosystem right now.
There was also a good project named Funded, that allowed small rounds and milestone-based approach. But it seems like they stopped operating.
Same confusion is observed throughout the ecosystem. Recent launches by Onicai (SNS) and Menese Protocol (custom) show that the community is not willing to fund projects in one big round, without first seeing strong execution and financial success (which are practically impossible to achieve without funding in the first place).
But how does an average dev team builds something then?
So we started thinking and came to the following conclusions:
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in the current market conditions, projects on ICP can either be funded privately or in small public rounds;
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transparency, accountability and execution history are the main factors for a successful fundraising, not the technological know-how;
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there is no ready-to-use framework for that in the industry in general, not just on the IC.
Teams can’t get funding → few teams build something meaningful → few use-cases for the IC → less teams try building. During “the good old times” this wasn’t the case: SNS worked OK for bigger projects, while dev grants allowed smaller projects to get bigger over time.
Now there is a gap. A gap, we know how to fill.
In this forum thread we announce Drifty Launch - a platform where communities can fund products step by step, while keeping visibility over milestones, treasury usage, and project progress.
Instead of launching a token first and hoping the team delivers later, the idea is to reverse the process:
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community-backed product creation
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milestone-gated funding
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backer-aware treasury oversight
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repeated proof of execution
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public launch only when the project is mature
We’ve prepared a litepaper for you available here: Drifty Launch Litepaper
It describes how such a platform could work, what benefits and risks are there, what actions will we take to make it happen and how you can help.
Please, give it a read and reply your opinion to this thread. Any feedback is important.
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If you’re a builder struggling with funding, please tell us, whether this idea implemented fully could help you continue building or why it could not.
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If you’re an SNS investor, please tell us if the flow described in the litepaper would make you feel more protected and williing to participate. If it doesn’t - tell us why.
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If you have any questions, please feel free to ask them. I will do my best to answer.
Have a nice day and take care!