Drift Protocol — September 2021 Monthly Update
Welcome to the #2 Drift Protocol monthly update where we unpack everything behind the scenes with our roadmap and the team.
September was laser focused on shipping out our devnet perps platform. We shipped our private devnet midway through the month and then released our public devnet at the end of September.
Alongside our product development, the team spent time on research, hashing out ideas for NFT Floor Perps implementation following the boom in the the space and finally supporting other emerging projects in the ecosystem.
Launch & Product Updates
Drift Protocol is live on devnet!
We wrote up a comprehensive evaluation of our product evolution in the past few months in this post. Read it here!
On September 29th, our public Devnet went live. We received an outpour of support from our community with 4k+ unique traders, 350k+ trades placed and over $1.6B traded.
Moreover, we received a crazy amount of feedback on our Canny Board. At the time of writing, we received 500+ comments with users being able to engage by commenting on each feature and upvoting the best feedback.
Many features on the public devnet were informed by the feedback we received from the community and we will be continually taking this on as we push towards mainnet (watch out for announcements here)!
Hiring
We’re hiring a full stack engineer alongside a trading systems and infrastructure engineer to optimise infrastructure for our arbitrage and liquidator bots.
Additionally, we are now looking for full stack engineering interns with the view to convert into full-time roles upon graduation.
Please see the respective JDs on Solana’s Job Board.
Community
We continued to scale out our community engagement both online and in person as crypto conferences began to resurface in September.
Conferences
The team gathered in New York with one of our team members speaking on the Future of Solana panel at Mainnet alongside Ben Sparango (Solana Labs), Dylan Macalinao (Saber), Matt Shapiro (Multicoin Capital).
Alongside Mainnet, we co-hosted “Solana Hot Ones” with Ben (Mercurial), Ori (Orca), Will (Jet Protocol) where members of each host team answered questions from both the audience and moderator (Grace from Hedgehog/EIV) in between hot wings!
Ecosystem
We supported many Solana NFT launches and partnerships as part of our community engagement across September. There were two launches we actively got behind and many others we supported.
Thugbirdz was one of the first projects the team got behind in the space. We were fortunate to meet 0x_thug before their launch with our community manager, 0xGlake minting one of the very first thugz ever.
We were excited with what the team were building and in the pre-Candy Machine era (where mints became more standardised), there were many issues that early NFT projects faced across the mint infrastructure. We rallied our team to assist with the Thugbirdz launch with our engineering lead, Chris, taking an active role in reviewing the contracts behind the mint.
Cyber Samurai is a special project for the Drift Team as it was put together by one of our first community managers — affectionately known as Shake. Shake has been a true OG with Drift and created extensive amount of content for us in the very beginning.
We were delighted to support Cyber Samurai as the inaugural project to be launched on the Raydium Dropzone. The project was 300% oversubscribed and was a resounding success!
Collaborations
Play Pass September Update
We are also at the early stages of creating our own community centred NFT that will grant access to a trading competition. We have been reaching out to artists in the solana ecosystem and also creating pieces tailored to particular NFT communities.
Here is a sneak peak of some of the early designs that have come back:
If you would like to get involved, come and join our discord or dm our twitter page!
Wen Mainnet?
We’re ecstatic to announce that we’ll be launching on alpha mainnet in mid-October!
There will be two alpha mainnet phases:
- (1) NFT-gated for early Discord and community members for two weeks,
- (2) open phase.
For our NFT-gated phase, Drift Alpha tickets will give access to the early mainnet. We want to reward our most engaged community members with early access to the mainnet! Tickets will be dropped to our most engaged users and Discord/Twitter members. The NFT ticket-gated phase will last for roughly two weeks. Deposits will be capped on alpha mainnet.
We’ll be dropping more hints around how to access these tickets… 👀
If you are interested in participating as one of the very first users; join our Discord to keep up to date on our first drop!
Get In Touch
🌐 Visit us at drift.trade 🌐
📩 Email us at hello@drift.trade 📩
💬 Connect with us on Discord 💬
👾 Find us on Twitter — @DriftProtocol 👾
