Drift Protocol Alpha Mainnet Launch

Drift Protocol
4 min readOct 25, 2021

Today, we’re stoked to announce that Drift’s closed alpha mainnet is now live.

After several months of grind, hard work, debugging, building security guardrails around our protocol and perfecting our UI — we’ve finally launched our alpha mainnet.

Late nights, neon lights @ the Hacker House

We successfully launched our mainnet at the Solana’s Chicago Hacker House, working with the guidance of Bartosz, Jordan and alongside the rest of the residents (HXRO and Mango teams)!

Thank you everyone for taking commenting on the Canny board and providing generous feedback!

The feedback we received was critical in swiftly pushing from our first version to the version you see today. To our most active community members, thank you for all the time you spent testing and sharing your notes: your contributions definitely do not go unnoticed! 👾

Drift Alpha Ticket

If any of you have seen one of these flying around on Twitter and wondered what it is — fear not, this post has got you covered.

What is this?

The Drift Alpha Ticket is a collection of NFTs exclusively released by Drift through rewarding early Discord users and its partnership with DeFi and NFT projects on the Solana network.

First and foremost, the tickets are required for access to Drift’s alpha mainnet. The team wanted a smooth technical roll-out of the alpha mainnet by staggering the growth of deposits to scaling volume and open interest (OI) comfortably. We also wanted to reward our early community members with a chance to trade on our protocol before the world does.

Beyond this though, the Drift Alpha Ticket is a way for the team to identify and reward its early adopters and believers.

We’re on a one-way path to being Solana’s top decentralised futures exchange and the Drift Alpha Ticket will let us know who our day ones are.

How do I ape a Drift Alpha Ticket?

There are 1,500 Drift Alpha Tickets in circulation. These will be distributed starting 26 October 2021 until the open mainnet launch. The tickets will be distributed across four main channels:

  1. Airdrops to OG Discord and Twitter followers;
  2. Devnet beta testers;
  3. Partner giveaways; and
  4. Twitter campaigns.

Please note that there will be no public sale for the purchase of Drift Alpha Tickets.

Discord “Airdrop”

This distribution is focussed on rewarding the community members who have been early to Drift and also those that have been the most active in our Discord.

We will be running raffles for users who have the roles: “Pit Crew”, “Game Winners”, and “Alpha Drifters”. A form will be going out soon on how to receive these.

We will also be continuing to give tickets to those who:

  • converse regularly on the Discord;
  • attend AMAs; and
  • give constructive feedback via Canny on the devnet product.

Devnet Beta Testers

This distribution is focussed on rewarding the participants that interacted with our devnet, tested the platform and returned to review their opened positions. It’s important to the team that we reward those that played an active part in this critical process and this is how we’re going to do that.

Devnet is now closed so if you missed out, be sure to not miss out on the other distribution methods ;)

Partnerships

This distribution is focused on rewarding the Solana communities that have been critical to Drift’s success to date. Beyond all the technical advantages Solana offers over the other layer one blockchains — Drift chose to build on Solana because of our desire to be a part of and grow this tight knit community.

As part of this, we will be teaming up with the biggest NFT and DeFi teams to run separate campaigns with a set number of tickets allocated to each project. There will be many ways to get a ticket and many communities to receive them from, so stay active and lookout for future announcements!

Our first partnerships will be announced on 26 October 2021.

Twitter Campaigns

You may have seen a few of these floating around already as we have started launching some of our Twitter campaigns.

We’re always keen to support and work with other projects, so if you’d like to be part of the Drift campaign, please reach out to us!

Why else would I want a Drift Alpha Ticket?

Holding a Drift Alpha Ticket makes you a special, early member of our community and we want to reward members of our community who have been there from the beginning of our ride.

You didn’t hear this from us, but holding a Drift Alpha Ticket might make you eligible for:

  • Future community rewards,
  • Access to trading competitions,
  • Ability to burn the tickets into Drift Play Pass NFTs or merchandise, 👀
  • Special Discord roles; and/or
  • A ton of clout.

When will I get these?

We’ll announce selected winners on Twitter and Discord every two days at roughly 00:00 UTC starting October 26. The current deposit limit is $1k per address, but we’ll be raising this soon. Watch out on our Twitter for updates!

Our airdrops to Discord will be underway and will occur every two days.

We’ll be airdropping tickets in batches, so watch out for surprises in your wallet! 👾

Get In Touch

🌐 Visit us at drift.trade 🌐

📩 Email us at hello@drift.trade 📩

💬 Connect with us on Discord 💬

👾 Find us on Twitter — @DriftProtocol 👾

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Drift Protocol

A scalable, decentralised, capital-efficient derivatives exchange built on Solana.