Solana creator platform DRiP Haus is targeting July for the release of its mobile app on Android and iOS, says Vibhu Norby, founder and CEO of Drip Labs.

The mobile app is important for the platform because it will come with a natively embedded wallet, which is automatically created for the user — massively easing the onboarding process, Norby said. The app is currently in alpha testing, and the actual timing will depend on the respective app stores, he added.

The DRiP Haus platform allows creators to distribute digital works, such as art or music, to their followers and receive payments and tips in return.

The platform is starting to expand the types of content and experiences available to creators. It also plans to include news and video on the platform, including podcasts. These will be directly available in the app — but can also be viewed in compatible wallets like Phantom, although the quality might differ.

“What’s nice is if you’re crypto native media, you are directly putting your assets in front of 100,000 solana collectors per day. Within the web2 media, that’s tiny; within crypto that’s a pretty big slice of folks,” said Norby.

He argued that other web2 subscription platforms for podcasts and similar media restrict access to content once a subscription is canceled. In contrast, with DRiP, users retain ownership of their content — which resides in their wallets — regardless of the platform itself.

The platform uses the Solana blockchain for payments, with the actual data hosted on the decentralized storage protocol Arweave. Although this setup allows someone to access the content directly and bypass all platform payments, Norby hopes that the platform’s ease of use will discourage such actions.

“We’ve definitely talked about the range of encrypted ideas here, but there’s no preventing piracy of content in this day and age and our best hope is to make it convenient and cheap enough to do the right thing through the app that you wouldn't need to find some other source that’s circumventing that,” he said.

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Dealing with high activity on Solana

DRiP Haus is one of the most active platforms on Solana, particularly outside the realm of DeFi applications.

The platform peaked at 160,000 daily active wallets earlier this year, according to Norby. However, in early April, heavy congestion on the Solana blockchain hampered the user experience.

In response, DRiP Haus changed the way its platform worked, replacing automatic collectible airdrops with a manual claim process. Although collectibles are still displayed on the platform, users must now choose to mint them to their wallets. This had a big negative impact on the protocol’s onchain collectible minting numbers, Norby said, while the number of daily active wallets fell to 100,000.

During this time, there has also been decreasing interest in NFTs more broadly. This has included a steady decline on Ethereum and a more gradual one on Solana, when looking at trading volumes. However, Norby argued that this has less of an impact on DRiP since it’s not a trading platform for NFTs but instead delivers tokenized content that includes NFTs.