ENS Turns On The Continuous Funding Tap With Drips Network

The official working group of the Ethereum Name Service has revealed a plan to tap into the Drips Network to provide another source of funding for the open-source projects that it relies on.

According to the ENS Ecosystem Working Group, the plan is to utilize Drips to provide $50,000 in USDC to seven of its most essential projects. Each of the projects – Wagmi, ethers.js, graphql-request, OpenZeppelin contracts, noble hashes, scure-base, and dns-packet – provides components that are essential to the ENS initiative. The funds will be streamed to them over the next six months, in-line with Drips’ daily ROI model.

The Ethereum Name Service is the project that oversees and develops the naming system domains on the Ethereum blockchain. It’s the secret sauce that enables crypto users to create a human-readable ENS name they can link to their wallet, NFTs or identity.

The project was founded by Ethereum Foundation alumni and ex-Googler Nick Johnson, whose uses the nick.eth domain. To date, more than 3 million .eth ENS names have been registered, with some of the more famous ones being vitalik.eth (Vitalik Buterin), ahopkins.eth (Anthony Hopkins) and puma.eth (Puma).

As for the ENS Ecosystem Working Group, it’s an initiative that has been tasked with nurturing the growing ecosystem around the ENS project. It was created because many of the projects that provide vital technologies used by ENS tend to be very ENS-centric or ENS-specific, meaning that they don’t have many applications elsewhere. As such, these projects often struggle to obtain the funding they need to keep up their development.

Because of the difficulty it faces in securing funding for its ecosystem projects, the ENS Ecosystem Working Group has to come up with some novel ideas to ensure the ENS project doesn’t come grinding to a halt, and the Drips Network fits the bill as the crypto industry’s “first-ever deflationary daily ROI platform”. Founded in 2021, Drip promises investors who deposit funds with its protocol a 1% daily return on their investment for up to 365% of their principal deposit. Its rewards are derived from a 10% tax placed on all transactions within Drips.

According to Drips Network, the protocol is designed as a source of continuous and transparent funding, and it is aimed at organizations very much like the ENS, which struggle to raise funding through traditional channels. By leveraging Drips, ENS supports not only the ecosystem projects mentioned above, but also their secondary dependencies.

Drips Network founder, Eleftherios Diakomichalis, was quick to welcome ENS onboard, saying it is one of the pioneers of a new cultural norm where blockchain-based organizations fund the infrastructure they depend on by themselves. “No ifs and unnecessary complications – just simple and transparent support for the infrastructure that makes their work possible,” he said. “This is what the future of public goods funding looks like.”

ENS ecosystem steward Slobo.eth said the project is pioneering a new, continuous dependency funding model that can potentially be embraced by various other open-source projects and public organizations. “Drips is a great way to support open source developers who do important work for the ENS Ecosystem,” he insisted.