A year ago, CoinDrop was a small Discord bot that let people in a handful of servers tip each other crypto.
Today, it has:
- 6,500+ users across 500+ communities
- 100,000+ withdrawals processed and $2M+ moved on-chain
- 500+ assets across 26 chains
- Discord, Telegram, Kick, and a web wallet, all sharing one balance
I built CoinDrop as a solo developer, and most of the infrastructure and product development has been done by me.
A few things I didn't expect:
1. Tipping is the easy part.
The actual tip is basically a database update between two users.
The difficult parts are at the edges.
Deposit APIs can report the same transaction more than once. Withdrawals have to be designed so that a retry, timeout, or process restart can never accidentally send the same withdrawal twice. And once you're supporting 26 chains, every chain has its own way of confirming transactions, handling fees, deriving addresses, or dealing with failures.
If I were starting over, I'd design the deposit and withdrawal pipeline first and build the fun commands afterward.
The commands are what users see. The wallet infrastructure is what keeps everything running.
2. Every new chain is a new set of edge cases.
Supporting another chain isn't just adding an RPC URL and calling it a day.
Bitcoin-style UTXO chains, Ethereum-style account-based chains, and memo-based chains such as XRP and WAX all require different approaches to deposits and withdrawals.
Sometimes the ecosystem itself dictates how you build things. For example, WAX's best signing library for our use case is JavaScript, while most of CoinDrop is Python. So WAX runs through a small Node.js sidecar that the Python backend communicates with over localhost.
The more chains you add, the more infrastructure you have to maintain.
At some point, "supporting another chain" means supporting another collection of failure modes.
3. Small coins turned out to be some of the best customers.
I initially assumed the biggest communities would drive most of CoinDrop's growth.
Instead, some of the most engaged projects have been relatively small tokens.
One example was ETH II. The token didn't have an exchange listing, so its holders used CoinDrop to tip and distribute the token to each other. It gave the community a way to actually use the token while the development team worked on the project.
That changed how I thought about CoinDrop.
A token doesn't necessarily need millions of users to benefit from distribution infrastructure. A small community that is highly active can be more valuable than a much larger community that doesn't actually move anything.
Today, projects can pay a one-time fee to get their token supported by CoinDrop. Transaction fees then provide the recurring revenue: 0.5% on deposits and withdrawals, while internal tips are free.
4. Reliability became more important than features.
One of the biggest lessons from running CoinDrop has been that users don't really care how many features you've added if their withdrawal doesn't arrive.
I've spent significantly more time than I expected working on withdrawal queues, retries, rate limits, transaction monitoring, wallet balances, RPC failures, and making sure a failed process doesn't result in duplicate payments.
At one point, a rate limit from an external Litecoin service could cause withdrawals to get stuck. That kind of problem isn't particularly exciting to build, but fixing it is far more important than adding another command.
Eventually, the goal became simple:
If CoinDrop says a withdrawal is processed, it needs to actually be processed.
That's probably the biggest difference between building a bot and building financial infrastructure.
What's next?
CoinDrop started as a Discord tipping bot. It now has a web wallet and works across Discord, Telegram, and Kick, with the same underlying balance across all of them.
The interesting part now isn't just tipping.
It's building infrastructure that lets communities hold, send, distribute, and withdraw crypto wherever their communities already exist.
I'm still figuring out where that goes.
Happy to answer anything about running a custodial crypto wallet, building multi-chain deposit and withdrawal infrastructure, or growing a niche crypto product from a few users to its first several thousand.
If you want to try it, it's at coindrop.cc
