DRiP is the leading collectibles platform on Solana. As of early 2024, DRiP has facilitated more than 100 million mints, from 100 creators, that have seen more than 3 million sales on secondary marketplaces. When you consider that all this has been achieved during a deep bear market – you can see why so many players within the Solana ecosystem are excited for DRiP’s continued growth and potential.
Users get access to new content in the form of new drops every week - all part of an overall goal of supporting creativity and artistry through engagement, and the potential for earning rewards.
Most recently, DRiP has been a pioneer of utilizing compressed NFTs on Solana - taking advantage of their low cost to facilitate large scale drops, at lower cost to creators, thereby democratizing the release of art, and other media types.
The Challenge: Tracking token ownership, reliably
As can be imagined, with the volume of drops DRiP has been running, and with how cheap compression makes NFTs on Solana, the amount of data and state needing to be synced has exploded.
In particular, DRiP was having challenges efficiently tracking the history of any DRiP-specific NFTs, keeping track of their metadata and ownership updates, and feeding them into their core database setup.
Maintaining the required pipelines in-house, along with the required compute and maintenance requirements seemed unappealing, particularly given the DRiP team’s desire to focus on the creator and end-user experiences.
The DRiP team evaluated their options - which is how they got started with the SimpleHash Kafka Bulk Service.
SimpleHash Kafka Bulk Service – Solving Bulk Solana Data Challenges
SimpleHash has supported Solana from the very beginning of its services, and was one of the earliest providers to launch full support for compressed NFT (cNFT) support, enabling its partners to take full advantage of indexed data from tokens adhering to the standard.
In conjunction, SimpleHash offers its Kafka Bulk service, which is designed for high-throughput applications requiring robust, real-time access to large volumes of NFT data.
Kafka is a distributed event streaming framework, capable of handling huge numbers of events. It’s often used to publish and subscribe to streams of records, or topics. SimpleHash provides a comprehensive set of Kafka topics, including (but not limited to):
- All NFT sales and transfers on a given chain
- All NFT ownership updates on a given chain
- All NFT token metadata updates on a given chain
- All market price updates for NFT collections on a given chain
Each topic can be replayed, along with the ongoing stream of real-time updates, providing flexibility for teams who need a reliable pipeline of NFT events to stream into their own infrastructure.
The Solution: DRiP and The SimpleHash Bulk Kafka Service
“We evaluated a range of different options when considering how to tackle keeping track of everything for DRiP tokens, and SimpleHash’s Kafka service made the most sense in terms of use case, and integration with our existing setup” – Joe Noon, CTO & Co-Founder, Drip Labs
SimpleHash and DRiP’s team began discussing the requirements, which included:
- The ability to track arbitrary tokens, and their metadata updates on Solana
- Being able to keep ownership state in sync, in real time
- An approach that would be reliable, and fully support compressed NFTs on Solana
- Have all of these data updates efficiently fed into DRiP’s internal database setup
SimpleHash’s Kafka solution met all of these requirements, and after trialing, the DRiP team gave the go-ahead for full integration.
“Getting up and running with the kafka service wasn’t a big lift - once we had the right code samples and input from the SimpleHash team it was seamless” – Joe Noon, CTO & Co-Founder, Drip Labs
As part of the integration, DRiP also needed to keep track of collection updates and identifiers. Given the multitude of different ways that collections are signified on Solana, DRiP also took advantage of SimpleHash’s unified collection identifiers, allowing the team to easily watch each Kafka stream for incoming tokens from each collection.
Once it was set up and running, DRiP was easily able to ingest all relevant events, and feed it into their core DB.
Comprehensive Solana data pipelines
As one of the most active and prominent projects on Solana today, DRiP has intense data requirements. As such, they take advantage of a comprehensive set of Kafka topics available via the SimpleHash platform for Solana:
- solana.nft - all ongoing metadata updates of Solana NFTs
- solana.collection - all ongoing updates of Solana collections (incl. floor prices and spam scores to help with filtering cNFT spam)
- solana.transfer - all ongoing transfer / sale events
- solana.owner - all ongoing token ownership changes
Utilizing these topics, the DRiP team has saved significant time and resources – and been able to allocate this towards building the best user experience possible, instead of focusing on the infrastructure layer.
The results: Up to 3 months saved of engineering development time
As the volumes of cNFTs continue to rise, SimpleHash is ready to continue powering any and all use cases that arise for DRiP. And moving ahead even further, SimpleHash is excited to continue supporting DRiP as they continue to push the frontier of what’s possible on Solana, and build the best creator-centric platform in crypto.
