Drip Protocol

Overview

Drip is a professional trading terminal for perpetual futures on Solana. It provides a complete interface for leveraged trading across majors, meme coins, and DeFi tokens — with up to 50x leverage, real-time order books, and advanced order types.

Under the hood, Drip is powered by the Percolator engine — the only formally verified risk engine for perpetual DEXs on Solana. Built by Anatoly Yakovenko (toly), Percolator uses mathematical proofs to guarantee that the exchange balance sheet remains solvent under all conditions.

Architecture

Drip follows a layered architecture. The frontend is a Next.js 14 application that communicates with the Solana blockchain via RPC. The Percolator engine runs as an on-chain Solana program that handles all risk accounting, while Drip provides the trading interface.

Frontend Stack

State Management

Drip uses Zustand stores for reactive global state. Each store manages a specific domain: market selection, price data, trade execution parameters, account balances, and open positions. Custom hooks like usePrices, useTrading, and usePositions abstract the blockchain interactions.

Percolator Engine

Percolator is a formally verified accounting and risk engine for perpetual futures DEXs on Solana. It was created by Anatoly Yakovenko (co-founder of Solana) and uses Kani model checking to mathematically prove key safety invariants.

Core Design

Percolator is a hybrid design combining synthetics-style risk with orderbook-style execution extensibility. Users take positions against liquidity provider (LP) accounts, while LPs can supply a pluggable matching engine that implements AMM, RFQ, or CLOB logic.

The engine itself does not move tokens. A wrapper program performs SPL transfers and calls into the engine for accounting. This separation of concerns ensures the risk logic remains clean and verifiable.

Key Invariants

Formal Verification

Percolator uses Kani model checking to verify its invariants. Conservation ensures balance-sheet integrity. Isolation prevents unauthorized cross-account access. The "no-teleport" property confirms that cross-LP position closures correctly account for mark-to-oracle settlement and don't create phantom value. The latest audit shows 118/118 proofs passing.

Markets

Drip supports 11 perpetual futures markets across three categories: major cryptocurrencies, meme coins, and DeFi tokens. Each market has a configurable maximum leverage, dedicated Pyth oracle feed, and independent risk parameters.

Market Categories

Trading

Drip provides a full-featured trading interface designed for professional traders. The terminal includes real-time candlestick charts, a live order book, one-click trading, and comprehensive portfolio management.

Order Types

Chart & Analysis

The trading chart supports 9 timeframes from 1-minute to 1-week candles, powered by TradingView's Lightweight Charts library. Real-time price updates stream directly from Pyth Network oracles for sub-second accuracy.

Keyboard Shortcuts

Power users can navigate the terminal entirely with keyboard shortcuts for rapid order placement and position management.

Risk & Margin

Risk management in Drip is enforced at the engine level by Percolator. The engine uses a variation-margin accounting model where positions are continuously settled to the oracle price. This ensures accurate margin calculations at all times.

Margin Model

Each account has a protected principal (capital) and a realized PnL claim. Mark-to-market equity is computed by combining these with the unrealized position PnL against the current oracle price. All margin checks use fee-debt-adjusted equity.

Liquidation

When an account's equity falls below the maintenance margin requirement, it becomes eligible for liquidation. The position is closed at the oracle price — no counterparty discovery is required. Losses are settled from the account's capital, and any unpaid remainder is socialized. A configurable liquidation fee is charged to the insurance pool.

Withdrawal Safety

Withdrawals only return capital, not unrealized PnL. The engine enforces multiple safety gates: fresh oracle prices, recent sweep completion, no pending socialization, and post-withdrawal margin validation for accounts with open positions. Profits convert to withdrawable capital through a time-gated warmup mechanism.

Fee Schedule

Oracles

Drip uses Pyth Network for real-time price feeds. Pyth provides sub-second price updates from institutional-grade data sources, ensuring accurate mark prices for margin calculations, liquidations, and trade settlement.

Each market has a dedicated Pyth price feed ID. Price data streams directly from Pyth's Hermes service to the frontend, while the on-chain engine uses Pyth oracle accounts for settlement.

Getting Started

Connect Your Wallet

Drip supports all major Solana wallets through the Wallet Adapter standard. Click the wallet button in the top-right corner of the trading terminal to connect Phantom, Solflare, or any compatible wallet.

Start Trading

Development Setup

To run Drip locally for development:

git clone https://github.com/jeffersonnnn/drip-percolator.git
cd drip-percolator/web
npm install
cp .env.example .env.local
npm run dev

The development server starts at http://localhost:3000. The app connects to Solana Devnet by default.

Links