Case Study: Dripster.fun

Dripster.fun is a token-based launchpad that helps creators bring physical products to market through token-driven economics. By issuing "dripcoins" tied to their product designs, creators allow investors to back innovative ideas and share in their success as demand grows.

The Dripster team chose The Graph’s Substreams for their scalability, cost efficiency, and ability to rapidly process high-volume blockchain data — Mirroring the team’s choice of Solana for scalability, low fees, and thriving ecosystem. These are key factors in high-volume trading and real-time interactions that power their model.

The Dripster Indexing Challenge

Dripster requires real-time transaction data such as tracking token minting, trades, staking, and holding durations to conduct regular operations. This data and its accuracy are crucial for Dripster functionality for processes like managing milestones, unlocking product claims, and ensuring precise reward distribution to holders and creators.

As the Dripster team prepared for their launch, they evaluated different ways to decode and extract the specific blockchain data they needed from Solana. Their primary concerns included complexity, reliability, latency, scalability, and the engineering overhead required for real-time blockchain indexing.

Initially, they evaluated building custom indexing infrastructure using tools like Anchor Indexer and Helius RPC, which would have required significant engineering resources for building and maintaining a custom indexing pipeline. Additionally, the Dripster team considered hosted indexing solutions, such as QuickNode and Alchemy, but these services raised concerns about long-term cost efficiency, scalability limitations,  latency issues at high throughput, and came with the potential for vendor lock-in.

Ultimately, the Dripster team chose Substreams for their data needs.

The Substreams Solution

With Substreams, Dripster efficiently decodes and manages Solana blockchain data, optimizing its data ingestion pipelines for speed and scalability. Substreams enable accurate and rapid processing of critical data points for Dripster like token trading volumes, milestone events, staking eligibility, and holding periods, empowering their team to focus more on product innovation rather than backend infrastructure.

After exploring all the choices, Dripster opted for Substreams for its anticipated engineering time savings: approximately 70% compared to custom indexing setups as well as  Substream’s expected 5x improvement in synchronization speed and 90% reduction in latency.

"Before launch, we carefully considered various blockchain indexing solutions but found most options overly complex, costly, or resource-intensive. Substreams clearly stood out, offering unmatched simplicity, scalability, and performance. Our team worked intensely to launch Dripster.fun in just one month, and without Substreams, it's highly unlikely we could have met this ambitious timeline while maintaining reliability and data accuracy." - Jonathan Brun, Co-Founder & CEO, Dripster

At the end of the day, integrating Substreams simplifies Dripster’s data operations, provides robust scalability, and delivers highly predictable and reliable data management. This ensures seamless user experiences, supports rapid growth, and mitigates technical complexity as Dripster.fun scales.

Join Dripster by building with Substreams and access the cutting-edge of DeFi data technology today.

About The Graph

The Graph is the leading indexing and query protocol powering the decentralized internet. Launched in 2018, it has enabled tens of thousands of developers to effortlessly build Subgraphs and Substreams across countless blockchains, including Ethereum, Solana, Arbitrum, Optimism, Base, Polygon, Celo, Soneium, and Avalanche.

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