📖 Documentation Menu

Architecture

How It Works

DRIP transforms a natural-language query into structured research through a five-step pipeline. Every step is transparent — you can see what data was collected, how it was analyzed, and what the AI concluded.

The Five-Step Pipeline

1. User Request

You submit a query — via the web agent, CLI, or API. It can be a company domain, a person's email, a token ticker, or a free-form question like “Who are Anthropic's key investors?”

2. Data Collection

DRIP's tool layer fans out across multiple data sources — company databases, social platforms, on-chain data, market feeds — and collects raw signals in parallel. This typically takes 2–5 seconds.

3. Analysis Engine

Raw data is normalized, deduplicated, and scored. Conflicting signals are flagged. Confidence levels are assigned to each data point based on source reliability and recency.

4. AI Reasoning

The AI brain (powered by OpenRouter) synthesizes collected data into a coherent research brief. It selects the right model for the task, interprets signals, and generates structured output with citations.

5. Insight Delivery

The final research brief is returned to you — as a chat message, CLI output, or JSON response. Every claim includes its source and confidence level. No hallucinated data, no unsupported claims.

Payment Model — x402

DRIP uses the x402 payment protocol instead of traditional API keys or subscriptions. Here's how it works:

  1. You send a request to any DRIP endpoint.
  2. The server responds with HTTP 402 Payment Required and a payment instruction (amount, recipient wallet, token).
  3. Your wallet (or SDK) signs and submits the payment on Solana.
  4. You retry the original request with the payment proof attached.
  5. The server verifies proof and returns the data.
💡Typical cost: ~$0.02–$0.05 per query. No subscriptions, no rate limits based on tiers — you pay exactly for what you use.

Request Flow

Simplified Flow
Client                   DRIP Server               Solana
  │                          │                        │
  ├── GET /research ────────▶│                        │
  │                          │                        │
  │◀── 402 Payment Required ─┤                        │
  │    (amount, wallet, token)                        │
  │                          │                        │
  ├── Sign + Submit ─────────────────────────────────▶│
  │                          │                        │
  │◀── Transaction Confirmed ─────────────────────────┤
  │                          │                        │
  ├── GET /research ────────▶│                        │
  │    (+ payment proof)     │                        │
  │                          ├── Collect data         │
  │                          ├── Analyze              │
  │                          ├── AI synthesis         │
  │◀── 200 Research Brief ───┤                        │
  │                          │                        │
← QuickstartWeb Agent →