Bankless - Doppler: A New Way to Launch Tokens with Austin Adams

Episode Date: June 3, 2025

Austin Adams, founder of Whetstone and creator of Doppler, joins to discuss the next evolution in token launches. We explore why the world needs more tokens—not fewer—and how Doppler enables creators, apps, and DAOs to build highly customized launchpads using modular tooling. We cover token market design, dynamic bonding curves to prevent sniping, and how this infrastructure could unlock more meaningful, value-connected tokens—from meme coins with DAOs to public market IPOs on-chain. ------ 📣SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY24 https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🪙FRAX | SELF SUFFICIENT DeFi https://bankless.cc/Frax 🦄UNISWAP | SWAP ON UNICHAIN https://bankless.cc/unichain 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle 🌐SELF | PROVE YOUR SELF https://bankless.cc/Self 🟠BINANCE | THE WORLDS #1 CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://bankless.cc/binance ------ TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Intro 4:08 Excess Tokens And Pushbacks 10:02 Doppler Explained 17:05 The Solution 25:37 Conserving Liquidity 32:58 Maximizing IPOs Using Doppler 42:32 Token to Real Value 50:31 Closing & Disclaimers ------ RESOURCES Austin Adams https://x.com/AustinAdams10 Whetstone Research https://x.com/whetstonedotcc Doppler https://www.doppler.lol/ ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures⁠

Austin Adams from Doppler. Does everyone need a token? I think everyone should launch at least one token in their lifetime. I think crypto people are kind of looking for justification as to why we need more tokens, not less. I think we should need more things priced, right? I think the coins are sort of a good market to price things, and we need to have more of them to price sort of like all the assets in the world.

I think it's like an easy way to have spin up a market on something, price it and let it be traded. There's so much sort of like valuable things in the world that have no price, so they're functionally worthless. We need to make it easier to price these things. We're creating value much faster than we can price. And so it's hard for people to get the value for the things that they deserve. There's a lot of meme coin pushback or valueless coin pushback, I think, from people because

people are very wary about the conduits for grift in the space, which I totally understand. But also, if you just look at the arc of crypto neutrally, you had Bitcoin and it was this invention that made the first internet asset. And then what did we do with that? We made 10,000 more blockchain. and then we realized we don't really need that many blockchains. Maybe you should just use Bitcoin. But then we made Ethereum.

Instead of making more blockchains, we created the ERC20 token. And so, you know, what was the original token launchpad? It was actually Ethereum, like the ERC20 token and the ICO meta, all of that. And then we made NFTs. And then, like, true, like, launchpads came with pump fun. And now we have, you know, 10,000 tokens being made a second. And so, like, I understand that there's, like, meme coin, vapid token. pushback, but you also, I think the listeners in generally speaking, crypto should be wary about

like pushing back on the thing that also seems to be kind of the main quest line of crypto. Yeah, I think like I agree, definitely agree with that. I understand people's pushback on meme coins. I think that they, a lot of them do have value. Clearly people put value in them, but they buy them and they sell them. I do think it's like exactly your point, right? Like we made a billion POW, you know, of chains that no one cared about. But some of them we did care a lot about, you know, one of which was Ethereum and a lot of sort of other nice chance that evolved out of that. And I would say that, like, we're going closer to a place where, like, we're trying to find out what tokens should be inside. And so I think, like, the natural thing is, like,

you know, we had no tokens and we sort of, like, have too many of them. And then we're going to sort of, like, put shoe hoarding them into other things. And I think some will be extremely lindy. They'll be so about, they'll be very valuable. There'll be sort of new types of markets that we're building things on top of that have value. I mean, clearly, like, content has value in the world. That's sort of, like, one thing that Jacob Azora talks all about is, like, content's very valuable. I mean, like, sort of like, you know, this podcast has value to me, has value to you. And so it's something that, like, people desire. And clearly, like, the platforms that we use make a lot of money on this content. And so it has value. It's just sort of, like, hard to ascribe it.

And it's easy enough to put it in a market and just see what people think it's worth and buying and selling it. I think over time, the way that we conjoined the value of something to the asset sort of will change over time. But I think it's like only moving towards everything is going to be priced. And that's like sort of like the end goal should be for everything. It'll be content. It'll be, you know, companies.

It'll be, you know, like maybe even like data and things that are valueless like meme coins as well. It sort of will be like the whole gamut of everything. And like if someone wants to buy something, are you going to stop them? Like, no, just let them buy. It's fine. Yeah. You use the word conjoining.

how do we conjoin a token to value? And I think that is like the trillion dollar question. Like whoever answers that question comes out with like a unicorn startup project. I mean, we have like real world assets, right? And real world assets, it's like, all right, we use the meat space legal system to conjoin value between something in the real world to a token. And then there's also like defy apps and DAO. So like a DAO is a way to conjoin the value of AVE to the AVE token, right?

And then meme coins is like, well, the conjoining here is. an idea. It's an idea, like where the idea is conjoined and that's very vapid, but nonetheless it is there. And I think, yeah, I think like any time we can find ways to conjoin things to this meme coin, we unlock something. That is not what I understand what you are working on. You are working on something very suited in this arena. Maybe you could walk us through, like, what Doppler is doing, because I kind of see it as a continuation of this arc that I said, starting with Bitcoin, ending with Pump Fun, and then like maybe Doppler is maybe the next step to push that frontier a little bit further, maybe get a little bit more sophisticated?

Let's hope, I would say, we're all hoping. Yeah, so I said like we work on, I in the sea of Weststone Research, we're sort of just like building products, building protocols that we think push the on-chain future for it. Our first protocol is called Doppler. It's, we call it a liquidity bootstrapping protocol, but what it's designed to do is generate tokens of value. So there's a lot of value on the internet. a lot of value in everything.

And we think that like there should be, these things should be tokenized and issued. And I think the only way we're really going to, you know, build these systems that can be conjoint just trying stuff out. And so we've built Doppler in a way such that you can, you know, pick a large menu of items, a large menu of sort of like individual pieces of a token. Like you could pick like if it has a Dow or if it has creator fees. If it's just like nothing, if it's just like a regular like pump fund style token,

you can pick between the prices that you want to set it. at. You can pick the bonding curve style. You can pick all of these things. And we're trying to say, like, there is some market structure that works. But we don't really know what it is. I don't think anyone really knows what it is. I think we know that these things have, we know that there is probably something that will work and we need to find it. And so we're building a system that's like a very piecemeal, very like money Lego-esque, trying to let creators and let people who want to launch tokens pick between all these things. And so we sort of like have two. And so, we sort of like have two customers, I would say. We have like the people who want to launch tokens and they want

like highly specialized, don't like white glove service where they want to pick these pieces. They want our help sort of like picking the protocol out and picking sort of like the technology and the pricing mechanisms they want to use. And our other sort of big customers, people who want customized launch pads. So I'd say like Zora is like one of our big customers and they wanted like a heavily specific or heavily optimized market for content. And they sort of were like, We don't really know what's going to look like, but we just know it's the current one's not very good. And so we spent a lot of time iterating on it, you know, pushing the start of the price discovery down a lot. And we have other people like Ohara who is doing AI tokens, AI app tokens, and they sort of like we're playing with their model and they have Dow's.

And we sort of have like a lot of other people who are building on top of this. And we're letting them pick from a menu of things, messing with their market structure, trying to find the most optimal way for them to launch tokens. We think that like, you know, tokens have an amazing flywheel. They have an amazing virality loop. And we're just trying to sort of find the market that works, right? Like I think we were talking about earlier, it's like these things are very clearly lindy. The market structure just kind of sucks. And everyone sees that.

It's hard to figure out how to fix it. And we think about this as a market structure problem. It's like we'd feel everything, the contracts to sort of the application or the contracts and the markets are sort of what we deal with. We give you an SDK. We give you all the contracts. And on the other side, applications can just call our contracts. They can sort of build these very customized models.

And they have to think about all those things. They just think about, like, the app and the way their users interact with their own app. And I think that's, like, how we're going to get a lot more tokens, a lot more good tokens as well. Because, like, an application developer can't build a lodge pad. It's too hard. It's not, like, Lindy. And we need to make it so that, like, there's the benefit of crypto is, like, everyone has money logos. And we want to build the seventh Lego or whatever.

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and more. Use Uniswops web app and wallet for a more efficient way to use Defi. Okay, so Wetstone Doppler is a software suite of tools. Like when I open up Photoshop, there's like a toolbar and it's got a little button, a bunch of buttons on it, and I'll select the right tool for what I need in the moment. And so you're building out the suite of tools, kind of just throwing everything at the wall, seeing what sticks, hoping the market kind of finds what sticks. But you're not a token launch pad like pump fun.

You are a build a launch pad workshop? Or how would you explain like I'm five this? I would say we're like a launch pad protocol so you can build your own launch pad on top of it. But at the same time, like you, we have our own interface called Pure Markets where we just sort of test stuff out and try things. And so, but we have other people who are building on top of it as well. So like they're building, you can build these customized launch pads on top of our thing. You're using the same code we're using. And we're sort of just building our interface because like we've, we functionally had to build one to make sure that people could use it.

And so we build, like we do like pretty traditional like meme coins with it with DAOs attached to them. So every single token launched on Pure has a DAO, it has token voting, it has a treasury. But some other people are building tokens that have no DAO's or building creator coins. We have other people who are building, you know, really small priced, like value, they're sort of like application coins where it's like tied to an application. So like on O'Hara, every single time you build a launch a token and you make an app, it has. as like a, you know, 10% of the token supply invests over 12 months to these creators who are vibe coding apps. And if your app takes off, you sort of have like a base of capital to work off of.

And so I would say that like, yeah, there's the incentives in this market are like kind of weird and every single app is very different and we can't treat them all the same. So I say that pump was like, you know, it's very good for meme coins. I think the pump team does a really great job. And like, I think that they are clearly innovating on something. And I think that they have made missteps along. the way, but it's like very clearly, like a, has a very bright community. And so we're just trying to take their model and protocolize it and let anyone use it instead of just like teams who own

the interface and teams who own the protocol. Right. So in the pump wars, pump fund came and they were the copy and paste factory for the SP1. The SP1 is like the ERC 20 for a token for Solana, right? And so they just made the first ever token launch pad. LaunchLab, which is the radium competitor to PumpFund, made launch lab and it's not a launch pad, it's a launchpad, launch pad. And so it lets you build your own launch pad so you can be the copy and pasteer of the Salana SP1 token contract. And then you can go compete with Pump Fun. And so now Launch Lab has, launch Lab helps you launch launch pads to do the SP1. The problem with the SP1 is that it's very uncustomizable in the Salana Lab. It's very great for copy and pasting because it just operates on the

same token contract. It's a Simpleton token contract. There's not a lot of customizability. You can talk to Martin from Mountain Protocol, who tried to like iterate this one small little feature that was like kind of like rebasing for their SP1 token, their stable coin on Solana that had yield. And it was just like a nightmare. And they had to lobby the Salana foundation to like get this one small little feature integrated into the SP1. Once they finally did, it worked. But without that, customizability, they were kind of hosed. And on the Ethereum side of things, is the ERC 20 token incredibly customizable, incredibly extensible, extensible, perhaps even to a fault because it chooses up a bunch of bytecode and data

and, like, inflates our nose. But whatever. So you are leveraging that fact about the ERC20 token of its extensibility, its customizable, and you're creating a bunch of modules, attachments to the ERC20 token to make it more fit for what some sector of the market for what their needs are. Maybe you could take a moment for like, what are the most popular sectors of the market that are using the most popular attachments on the ERC 20 token? Like what are the most reused bits of code that you've supplied to the market? Yeah, say that like the most reused code is going to be like, you know, the DAOs are very reused.

Sort of the token voting from Open Zeppelin is like very reused. These are things that are like, you know, in thousands and hundreds of thousands of ERC20s at this point. But they're not in all ERC20s, right? They're not in all of them. And another piece that we reuse a lot is our liquidity deep bootstrapping model. So we deploy like a pool for you. We initialize all, or I guess the protocol deployes it for you and initializes all of it. Is that a balancer pool?

No, it's a uniswap pool. So we built a sort of like specialized uniswap pool designed exactly for liquid for liquidity deep bootstrapping. And pretty soon we're putting out a new version that's built even like leveraging unit swap before pushing the bounds more on sort of like what can. Can we, like, how can we take all of the thoughts away from all our integrators and make it just a contract call? So, like, right now when someone uses our contracts, they just, like, give us call data to our contracts, and it just does everything. It makes the pool. It makes the token. It makes the governance.

It makes the migration contract. It makes everything. And we're trying to get that for everyone. So it's just like, you just call SDK makes you some parameters. You call the smart contracts and your brain just gets to turn off. I think that's like how it should be. It shouldn't, you know, it's impossible. It's insane to expect, like, everyone to, like, understand the deep minutia of, like,

uniswap markets and, like, what are all these things? What are these things mean? We'll never scale past, like, the 50, you know, like a thousand devs we have in crypto. We, like, the internet sort of showed that, like, you just give everyone packages that do, like, extremely complicated things. And, like, no one knows how, like, you know, TensorFlow or PyTorch works. But, like, they're generating apps. They're generating, like, really cool images all the time based off of them.

And so we need to make like packages that people use. They don't have to think about the mission port them and use them. And so we're trying to do that for tokens, into the same thing. And yeah, I mean, like people reuse. We sort of like supply a lot of different things.

But I would say like the most popular things are like the creator style, like social content tokens that like fees back to like creators and protocols. And then also do like Dow tokens where you create a Dow for something and it exists long term for these users, and it does, like, large-scale capital bootstrapping. And, like, community, the community owns a treasury. The community gets to the LP. They get tokens over time. And so, like, those things are just, like, very unique to crypto. Like, we're sort of how, and, like, very unique to crypto and very unique to Ethereum, where, like, we have this sort of, like, large, you know, different types of tokens that, like, anyone can use. And they're very

different. But, like, at the end of the day, like, it's, like, functionally the same code. It's, like, very well-trusted, very parameterizable code that anyone can. could pick from. There's two problems out there that I think are worth tackling that I think in theory could be tackled by what you're building and I'll, I'd like to get your take on them. And they're very related too. One of them is kind of, I guess, like corporate governance, which I guess is covered by the Dow tooling. But what I really mean by that is there were a lot of meme coins that were launched by Pumpthought fun, AI16Z for example. I've been using this example a lot on the podcast where it was just a meme coin AI 16 Z.

Ha ha, ha, that's hilarious. We're making, it's during the AI model, the AI agent meta. But then the thing pumped to like $600 million because the founder, Shaw and a bunch of other people decided that like, you know, there was actually enough there to go work on the project. And so they actually decided to, you know, start as a meme coin, but they backed it into a startup. They were like, oh, let's turn a startup out of this, which the reason why they did that was

because the meme coin went to $600 million or a billion dollars at the point. It only really works when the token goes. up and they're all getting wealthy. But when the token goes down, they realize that they are all working on this fucking meme coin and they didn't take team shares and they don't have any vesting equity and

they don't have any long-term incentives. And so when the token price went down, the whole project imploded because they didn't think about long-term incentives. They didn't balance the books. They didn't have enough supply for the team to be incentivized. And so, like, one set of software tools I think would be good is people

who want to launch a meme coin, while also have team shares at the same time. How do you fix this problem? That was something I actually was very aware of. I actually was aware of a lot of these like meme coin teams are like, they're very sophisticated. They have like, you know, teams. They have people who are working on them.

And they just like can't really do anything long term. Like it just sort of hits a point where like exactly what you said like, they need some type of like corporate governance. And so every single token we launch on our interface has a Dow exactly for this purpose. where it's like if people, if it takes off to a certain point, you can become something like a regular Dow. Because I think like a lot of these, I think a lot of these tokens are more functionally similar to DAOs

than we want them to, like, you know, the people think they are. And we need to let them sort of transition from being pure meme coins to like being meme coins plus. And so that's sort of what we think of these DAO today. So like right now we have a Dow, it's called A, and it like has, you know, I think it's like $500,000 in invested or in tokens inside the Dow control by the Dow Treasury,

so token holders can vote on that. And it has ETH inside of it to do sort of ETH, you know, things as well. And like long term, the community can do things with it. Like they can actually like pay salaries if they wanted to. They could pay for anything they really want to. They could like sort of leverage that capital. And I think like that's what I think was really powerful about meme coins is we had this like permissionless capital formation that grew from.

I mean, people like wanting to, they believe in the AI 16 Z vision. They're like, this thing's cool. I want to like get into this. I believe in the AI. I like want to,

you know, take part in it. And they, you know, they just couldn't do it. They like, there's just no corporate way to do that. And so we think a lot about like how do we let people,

they don't have to be Dow. It's like you don't, who care. Like you don't have to, don't worry about the Dow. Right. Right. At Dow and a team.

Yeah, exactly. Like just like if it does, if you don't care about the Dow, just don't use it. Like, who cares? It's just like a smart contract that sits there that no one has to worry about and no one has to think about. And it's just a meme coin at the end of the day. But if you want a transition, you can. And we don't make that decision for you at the start either. So it's like you can, these decisions are delayed and there's time for the market to sort of settle around these things.

It's almost like when you're starting an LLC and you're like working with your lawyer because you're like serious about your LLC, you're not just doing like legal Zoom. But honestly, even if you are doing legal Zoom. It'll ask you a series of questions of like, do you want this property in your LLC? Like, what about this? Would you like to add this to the contract? And it's the same thing. It's like the smart contract. Would you like to add some sort of like rules about team corporate governance investing and, you know, whatever you would might need to like start a token in a way that you would want to start it? It's the same same. So you're like legal Zoom for token deployments. Yeah. I mean, I think like we're trying to make it like be this infrastructure that people can

build these things on top of. I think like, it's like we have these like amazing on chain. We have these amazing formation models, these primitives. We just like don't really use them very much. And I'm like, wow, just like, let's just use them. Let's see what happens. See what we just try to build some stuff. It's cool. And yeah, I do think like, that's something we're like particularly proud of is like we have, I think we have like 25 voters on the A token who are like, they're like going to vote on stuff and we're going to like mess with the parameters. And that's, that's, It's like very, I think very unique. It's like no one's really, it's just different and people are trying new things.

And it's like, that's something that I think every meme coin needs. It needs to like be able to turn to meme coin plus because that's what people expect out of them once they hit a certain valuation. They expect a team to do things. Okay. So that was the first problem I wanted to tackle. The second one is sniper bots because that is, that will completely eff up the genesis of any meme coin launch.

And if anyone knows that a meme coin launch is trying to be serious, then the sniper race to the bottom is on. And then it destroys the seriousness of the meme coin when one sniper captures 60% of the supply in the first block. And now that the whole purpose behind that meme coin is gone. So how do you solve the sniper problem? Yeah. So I was really on friend tech earlier early,

and it was very obvious. We call them static bonding curves. They're like the typical bonding curve that most people use are static. They just sort of sit there. They don't change. They don't move over time. And I remember like everyone buying, If you're on Frentek early, you sort of saw like every new thing got, had a million people buying it.

And it was sort of, I was like, this is like kind of bad. Like, this is bad market structure. I know that Pumps sort of got a lot of inspiration as like sort of to a lot of people from the Frentex bonding curve model. And it was pretty clear to me pretty early on in Pump that like this was going to be very problematic. And it was going to get more and more problematic as the sort of like perceived value of these new token launches went up. And it was going to get continually. get worse and worse. And so we spent a lot of time trying to build a model that we thought would fix that. And we built dynamic bonding curves, what we call them. And we're hopefully introducing

them very soon that adjust during execution. So they don't treat every single, they don't treat every single launch the same. So if like someone comes in and tries to buy a lot really early, we're like, oh, man, we, we missed the price. Let's increase the price a lot. Let's not sell as much. Let's move the price. so that less is sold, and we can take this market feedback and adjust over time and not treat every single token launch the same, because static bonding curves do that. They treat, you know, if you bond in two seconds or you bond in two days, it's the same. The market structure is exactly the same. And I wrote a white paper about this like a year ago, and I theorized like this exact problem.

I was like this is like exactly what's going to happen. Like we've seen this on Believe where every single token launch gets absolutely sniped because the perceived value is so high. and that just sort of causes like this cascading failure of like value being leaked from the system. And it was like, I think it was like really obvious. And, you know, I think it was like pretty obvious to me that this was going to be what would happen. And so we sort of spent, you know, months and months trying to figure out how to break it. And we think we did with our current dynamic bonding curve model and we're hoping to bring it to market very soon to push these things out.

Because I think like this is what's necessary for, you know, the Solana calls like internet capital markets. I just think it's like on-chain capital formation. And I think like, it's the same meme. It's just now, now I somehow got Solana coded. I don't think it's Salonacoded. That's the internet capital markets is what we've been doing in crypto from day one. Works. I think if we need that, we need to systems that adjust over time.

They just like, we can't sell valuable things on static bonding curves. It doesn't work. And so we need a new thing. And I think it's going to be dynamic bonding curves. It's this thing, like, you could launch meme coins on it. You can launch RWAs. You can launch equities. You can launch protocol tokens.

It's like that's going to need to this dynamic. model and I think like sort of we built it for that. So you're not eliminating there's I guess there's no way to eliminate snipers. But are you preemptively changing the shape of the bonding curve before the order executes in order to prevent sniping? How does that work? I'm a little bit cloudy on the detail. Yeah. So we stream liquidity in over time. So we put like significantly less of the liquidity on the curve and during sort of execution we adjust much faster. And so you don't sell 100% of the token immediately. You sell maybe like one or two percent of the token. And if people immediately race and buy that a lot, you just end the sale, right? If you hit a certain amount

of proceeds, you just end the sale immediately. And you use that sort of like bond liquidity again. So you say, like, great, I wanted to raise a million dollars. Say I raised a million dollars selling 1% of the token supply. Why sell the rest of the 99? I don't want that. I'm going to keep the 99. and that means that like in all these believe sales or something like that like you would only be selling very little and the bonding curve sort of works by locking people in so you can still sell but it's not it's not risk free anymore the sort of system moves against you so if you it's like based off demand so like if demand is really high and the demand drops off a cliff we sort of are trying to find the price where demand equals like we're trying to sell like a certain amount of demand or certain amount of tokens per auction period and if it's too high we increase the price if it's too low, we decrease the price. And then we just do this over and over and over and over again inside a hook until we reach some equilibrium. And it just looks like swapping to users. Users don't see any of this.

They just sort of hit swap. And we do all this math inside the uniswap pool. It's also reactive over time. So time is a factor, is a variable that's known to the protocol. And so if the price is not changing over time, you accelerate the rate of the price changing. And so you do find the market clearing price quickly. efficiently quick. It's not like a very slow static change over a long period of time, right? Yeah. It's all parameterizable. I mean, you could do sales over a year if you wanted to. I mean,

that would be kind of crazy, but you could also do sales over five minutes. They did. They did, and it worked very well for them. It worked very well. I think about that one a lot of lot of, and it is a, I think, like, as we're sort of saying early, like, we don't really know how long it should be. I think it's probably different for every asset, but at the same time, like, we're just going to try a bunch of stuff and see which one works. Okay, so it's kind of like, I don't want to use the word circuit breaker because that's a trad word and it implies your yoinkin the market top down. It's more of just like you're adding in micro circuit breakers that like pop slowly and put the brakes on things that allows humans slower acting humans to act at the same speed of the bots or at least reduce the edge that snipers have to be marginal instead of maximal. I would say that like who we're optimizing for is the person who's best. at picking the price of the asset.

So if you think the price is too low, buy it, if you think the price is too high, sell it. And if you're wrong, you lose money. And that's sort of how it should be. If you're impatient, you also lose money, right? Yeah, I guess you'd have to sell it back and then you'd sort of lose money. But we're trying to say that, like,

if you're good at picking, the person who should be rewarded in these markets is the person who picks the best. And that's like, you know, that could be anybody. Like, anyone could be the best picker. We don't want to be the, we don't want to incentivize the person who's the fastest. We want to incentivize the person who's the best at pricing things. Can I give you a bare case for what's going on, what I think is that going on?

Because I think there is a very big effort by many people to build the best technically strong, sophisticated token launch pad. And then the DGens are like, I like that meme. It's on pump fun. I don't care about 30% slippage. Let me buy. And actually is optimizing for low. IQ is actually the thing to do. What's your response? I mean, I totally get that. I would say that, like,

we're going for different users here. I'm trying to be, I think, like, I'm trying to say, like, the incentives I'm trying to go for is I'm trying to get as much money for issuers as humanly possible. So our protocol is like, if you're issuing, we're trying to build the, their protocol is trying to say, like, I'm going to put tokens in my protocol. I'm going to get as much humanly out for you. And I would say that, like, it's not, this is, it's a different view. user persona than Pump users. And I think like people want to, people are going to go, I think like in the, these people who speculate, I don't think they really care about whether they're speculating.

They just want to, you know, speculate on the best things. They want to, you know if it's a company, if it's a meme, it's anything. Like, you just sort of give them the best opportunities and they'll go there. And I think Pump has given people the best opportunities. It's very clearly done that. And so I would say that like, we're not really trying to compete with Pump. I think they're very good at their game and I don't really want to compete with them. I want to compete on like, on sort of like with centralized exchanges.

And I want to compete with sort of like market makers and underwriters. That's like the sort of person I'm trying to compete with. And that's a different game. And we're trying to compete for issuers who want to issue assets. And I want to get like those like, you know, if you want to issue on pump, go do it. You know, if you think it's going to get you more money, do it. I don't really care. But I think it's not going to for large scale users who know, want to launch a token over $100,000

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Doppler? Either one. We so it's a little confusing. Doppler's the product. Wetstone is the lab. Okay. Is a public market's IPO on chain where there is not liquidity anywhere else. You're not, you're not putting like coin stock on chain. You're doing a, a, you're going public with a company that their last round was 50. billion. So their float is going to come out somewhere between $25 and $75 billion. No one really knows. But in the trad world, there's this whole series of, like, banks and discussions to determine what the starting price is. And I don't really know how that works out, actually.

It's all closed doors. But, like, doing it in the public markets on chain with M.E.V. and sniper bots, different kind of beast. And so the maximum bulk case, there's a hypothesizing here, is that some companies, blockworks. Blockworks goes public at, I don't know what. Hit my line, Mike. Billion dollars. Billion dollars. Congrats Mike and Yano.

You got a billion dollar valuation. They want to do the token. And they want to float their token fairly, maximize their IPO. And they go to Doppler to build out the issuance platform to make sure that snipers don't go too crazy. And Blockworks maximizes their IPO. How do you feel about this scenario? What are your thoughts? Yeah.

I would say that, like, you know, public markets are actually, like, very inefficient and sort of IPO. I mean, he's extremely inefficient. I wrote a paper about this, like, in, like, in November. The average IPO issuance loses 27% of the value put into it. It's, like, actually ridiculous, 27% to underwriters, and sort of like the people, you know, the roadshow people, the people who are sort of buying it. And that's, like, part of that's due to fees and a lot of that's due to mispricing. So there's a structural incentive for under, for underwriters to make. misprice these IPOs. So like IPOs, I think they're going to do worse. They underpriced those.

And then IPOs, I think they're going to do better. They don't reprice those. And so there are structurally incentivized to not give you the best price. And so seems like a racket. Yeah. So there's like, you know, you can look at the math. It's since 1980 or something, I think it's 1980 or 1990, spreads on lit exchanges on the U.S. have collapsed. They've collapsed almost 85%, but spreads on IPO issuance haven't changed. It's been 7% since 1990. And they've been steady. It's called the 7% solution, that's what they call it, and has never changed. It's just never done anything. And I think a lot about that. I'm like, that's a lot of money. It's just so much money. And it's like, can I be better than 27%? Like, I hope so. I think so. We'll get there.

And I think that is, it's far more, it's far worse than people think it is, the sort of And one of the reasons why people don't think a lot about it is because there's no alternative. There's just like you have to, you just like have to do it. And we've seen this in crypto where like people started off doing like they're like, oh, you have to pay your centralized exchange to list because like what else are you going to do? And then people sort of like moved to Dex's, like Dex First listings. That sort of changed, I think, became a lot. And we're like the structural incentives for projects, they're less sort of like required to use a centralized exchange to sort of like get liquidity and that has sort of like changed the game.

It's like the same thing. And so I would say that like for me, I think a lot of, I actually think that the most interesting person for the protocol is people who couldn't IPO or couldn't get liquidity or are building new assets that like are ever going to be supported by market maker or underwriters. Like these are the people who are like there was like five IPOs or something in 2024. And in 1990, there used to be $5,000 a year. There's been a structurally decrease in the amount of IPOed assets for almost straight down for 30 years.

And it's because underwriters, they get paid based off of the commission, which is based off of the issuance amount. And so they're doing significantly fewer but significantly larger capital raises. And so they don't really care about, like, if you're like, I'm going to launch a $10 million token, they're like, I don't care. I'm going to go spend, you know, another two weeks on this half trillion. million dollar one. And that's like... Right. And max extract on that. Yeah, that's sort of, I think, you know, the, your words, I guess I'll let you say that. And so I would say that like the people who are the most hurt by this are people who are not launching those $100 billion companies. So the people who are launching the, you know, $10 million companies. And that's like the, those are actually a very, very underserved market. They're extremely underserved. And they are SMEs in the U.S. or small, medium size enterprises are there's many more. of them than the, than I, sort of like large companies. And so it, Rubik remains to be seeing, like, maybe they are the ones who actually matter the most.

Interesting. Yeah. I was asking that question about, like, the theoretical question about if blockworks were to IPO using Doppler because it's kind of like, I like possible use case. But it sounds like it's something closer to a North Star for what you are trying to do. Sounds like you are very passionate about that. Yeah. I mean, I think, like, for me, it's just like, I think there's a lot of structural goodness on

public markets. I'm like a public markets bowl and they're like being gate kept essentially and you just can't get into them anymore and it's hard and I want more people to get into them. I think there's a lot of value for like capital raises and a lot of value for sort of like the wider economy as a whole and I think it's being strangled essentially and we need to make it like easier to do that. What is a seemingly obvious low hanging fruit usage of your software that you are confused as to to why no one has done that yet? Or what would you do next? If you were forced to stop working on Doppler

and start using Doppler as an engineer, what would you go do? That's a good question. I think something I've really confused by, I think every single, like, interface that has distribution should have a token launcher at this point. Like, it's very clear that, like, people like to launch tokens.

They're very valuable. And so I think that the obvious next step would be like every interface should be building on top of these things. I would say that... Wait, wait, wait, wait, right. Tell me. If I have an owner, if I own my user,

so the readers of banklist.com. Give them a token launcher. Right now. In like an article? Why not? I don't know. In line? It's like, here's a token that goes with this article.

Like, how about it? Why not? You know, like, people can buy it if they want to. They don't have to. If they don't want to. I think tokens have a lot of virality in them. And like, people like, like, buying them. They get a lot of attention.

And so I think there should be more of them. I guess actually answer your question, I would do Unitsox part two on Doppler. I have a hat. We have these hats that would call Pure Hats, and I would launch those on a bonding curve. Because I think it's cool. And I think fashion actually has a lot of issues with monetization. And so I would do like Unisox-esque stuff. I think that would be kind of fun.

You do a tokenized fashion collab. That's with some sort of like influencer or disqualification. You need distribution. You do. I'm wearing my kid super stuff right now. So I think that... Oh, dude, I missed my drive. They're good.

They're good. And they, you know, it's... I'll hit them up for it. And we'll see if we can get some kid super unisos collab. Because I think like that's like the stuff's cool. Was it you that pilled Mike Apolito on like the integration of markets and tokens and like news basically? Because he, like, there was a moment in time where I watched him like two months ago. And all of a sudden he was talking about.

like some nebulous thing of like markets and tokens and content and then and then he's been going down that rabbit hole. Was that you? I hope so. He has said he I did two podcasts with him, one about that. And I was like very like, you know, every single thing is going to be content or every single thing is going to become a market. So you can price it in real time like a prediction market. And so I do think I do think I impacted him. I think Jacob and Zora also did a lot of working on it. I think us too very much destroyed that man's brain, unfortunately, on with terms of content coins. But I think he would know.

I think you would know as well, right? Like, you guys are a content creator. It's very hard to monetize content. And you're very much at the behest of sort of like traditional monetization platforms. And it's kind of crazy how much control they have over you. Like, you know, large YouTube creators are treated like just trash. And like, they should have more say over their monetization. Processation pathway and we've seen like countless YouTube channels essentially just die because

YouTube just said like our Algo triggered on your content you said a bad word and like maybe they And maybe it wasn't even related to like an actually bad word. It was just sort of like a bad It hit like their algorithm that's like an AI bought now and now you're just dead. You're sort of like whole life's gone now and I think like that's unacceptable like people are credit these content careers are creating things that are very valuable and they need to control their own sort of like this so now. I mean I'm just like thinking like bankless we put out four bits of content every single day. So like three newsletter bits, the daily brief was just summary and then a podcast, right? And so, you know, if we put a token on every single one of those things, most of them are going to be zero worth tokens. But then I'm, then I go think of like, when we had like 5,000 people in a live stream between Eric Voorhees and Sam Bankman Fried. And I remember that that live stream was like hovering around 700 people for a while. And it was like kind of a good

debate. This is before we knew Sam was about to collapse, right? This was like five or seven days before the collapse of FTX. And it was like a debate. It was a theoretical debate about like the permission list of Avey and email. And then there was this one moment where Eric Forhees asked this very precise question. I think it was the Avey email question. And Sam started getting flustered and started acting erratic. And then people were like, what's going on here? And the viewership spiked from 700 to like 2,000 inside of a very short amount of time. And I'm just imagining if there was a token trading at that moment of time, they would have been correlated to the concurrent viewers on the show.

Probably. Probably. I would just imagine a chart to go with all of the traffic that we had. I think that would be life in that chart, at least during the era of that live stream. I think so as well. And I think you're right that a lot of them would be zero. but I think that like a lot of them wouldn't and I think it's actually the long tail of like the I guess like the the one in a thousand

and one in a hundred outcomes where that exact thing happens right where it's like just this absolutely insane viral moment that gets captured and like you don't have any other way to do that and like say a lot of them are zero yeah who cares but like some of them are not going to be zero and some of them be very valuable especially like say you had an ad or something on the lifetime stream of that moment. And everyone was looking at it. And like every single time they looked at it, it was just a little bit more money

that wanted that token. Like, and they're so lindy and they expect, they live for so long. And content is like, a lot of content is ephemeral, but a lot of it's not. And so those things like,

you know, there's blog posts I read that are like 10, 15 years old now that like maybe they should get some ad value. Maybe they should have sort of like content. Like maybe these things have a longer than ephemeral value. I think the average thing, I think this is something I actually said to you on Twitter was like the average thing is not important, but that does not mean that content is valueless.

Like a lot of it has value. It's just like a lot of it is zero, but like a lot of things in life are zero. There are a lot of them are zero, but you want to be able to set up when those things aren't zero. That's like sort of the system. And I think markets are very, very good at that. What was that one painter or maybe composer who like was not famous during while they were alive, but then after they died, they kind of blew up? I think a lot of them did that. Van Gogh, I think, was the very famous one.

Van Gogh, was Van Gogh like that? Yeah, he, like, very notoriously, like, exploded. And, like, yeah, like, no one cared about his stuff and it exploded afterwards. And, like, you know. And imagine if, like, the incentive to, like, if there's a, if Van Gogh tokenized his paintings, right? Like, meme coined his paintings. This is hilarious. It's bullish.

That's also bullish. I love that idea. And then, like, and then this one person stumbles across him and be like, wait a second, this shit. is fire. This is sick. Oh, the token is worth, it's a $25,000 market cap. I'm going to buy all of these tokens. And then they're going to CTO Van Gogh.

And then somebody just CTO's Van Gogh and discovers Van Gogh. And then all of a sudden, it turns out Van Gogh is really fire. And all the world knows about it. And this one person CTO the hell out of the token. I think that would be hilarious. I think that's what happened probably, right. I assume somebody bought up, you know, some Van Gogh enjoyer bought a bunch of Van Gogh. and they said, this shit's fire, like, let's put it all out.

And I think that that's like, that's probably actually, like, they just CTOed it. And, you know, he didn't do it himself. Someone else had to do it for him. And it probably was, like, one person. And, like, I guess true of a lot of things, a lot of things, like, I think that's one reason why Zora is very interesting to me is, like, you have this instructional incentive to, like, show content you care about to people because, like, you have some upside. And maybe it's very small. but like very small upside tilts the incentives ever so small to for you and yeah maybe sometimes they are like not not important but like sometimes are very important and so I think like a lot of people think about these things like they don't think about like you shared that content to your friends and you know maybe like started this like my reality loop and you captured down of it and the platform captured all of it and you could have died some upside into it and like I think the actually actual big issue with all of these coins is people spend way too much money on them. Like,

I buy my 10 cent little things on Zora and I, it's great. I have a great time. And I think it's like, if you think about it like that where it's like, you know, just like a little bit of like a click or something like that, like it's very different than buying like hundreds of thousands of dollars of these coins and losing all of it. Especially if we can really fix the problem that we were talking about earlier of like coupling value, true value capture into the token rather than just like the token being memetic, memetically associated. Like you said something where like, like the advertising revenue on a piece of content goes into buying back the token. Like if I go click on a website, that click is worth two cents.

That's 50% fee split between like the creator and then also the token holders, 50 cents goes to burn. And then all of a sudden you can buy that token as a function of the traffic on that website if you think you need to CTO some like dusty old blog that you think is going to blow up in a hot sec. And so like I think a lot of this, a lot of the optionality can really blossom here with an additional effort being placed on like, the coupling of the token to real value capture. I think that's like what we think about all the time is like how do you build something that has like I say that like meme coins inherently have no value. I wouldn't say

inherently. I think a lot of them actually do have value. But like that's like the thing people say is like these are valueless tokens. It's like okay, we know we had valuable token. Let's do valuable tokens. How do we build valuable tokens that are sort of tied to something? Like maybe it's an on-chain organization. Maybe it's content. Maybe it's, I don't know, art, music fashion, you know, blog posts. It's like, These things are valuable. Like, tie something to it and people should speculate on them. They should buy them.

And if you don't want to, don't buy it. I don't care. Like, that's fine. But, like, there's a lot of people in the world who will and a lot of people who want upside and doing that. And they should be allowed to do that if they want to. And there's a lot of different ways you can play with it to build these incentive structures for people to push the virality loop or push the incentives you want on the market.

It's just like it's up to you to build them and build them in the way such that like it's safe for all users. Valuable tokens in contrast to value list tokens is I think one of the main reasons why many of us are here in crypto. And so maybe the first arc of crypto is learning to make tokens. And now I would say that we have sufficiently learned to make tokens. Like I think you need to polish off some of the tools that you're building at Doppler and then we're going to good to go on that front. And then the next era starts just like, all right, cool, we learn to make tokens. How do we make valuable tokens? And I think the SEC getting unblocked from us is very helpful in that regard.

And just a few more mechanisms and tools in our tool belts. And we can start to make internet capital markets with valuable tokens, which, like I said, as I think one of the reasons why we are all here. It's certainly why I'm here. I think it's like that's the most interesting thing to me in all of this is like, let people buy things. It's fine. Let people buy things you believe in and make money off of it. Like that's like the dream, I would say.

That's the whole thing. Awesome. Really great. Bring you on. Really great to meet you, my man. Appreciate it. It was a great chat with you as well.

People are peaked or they just want to follow you on Twitter. Where should they go? How should they learn? And also, who are you looking for? Are you hiring or what do you need help with? Who do you want to talk to? If you want to issue a token or you want to integrate with our protocol, add a launch pad to your, if you are like, ah, I have valuable things.

I want to add tokens to them. Please hit me up. We're trying to make it as easy possible to do that. We think it's like, we'll help you design your thing. I think it's very interesting. and I want to know what you do want. And yeah, I'm on Twitter at Austin Adams 10, and we're like whetstone.cc is our company Twitter

where we like tweet about all of our products. And so you can sort of find us there. Cool. Awesome. Thanks for coming on my man. Of course. Bankless Nation, you guys know the deal. Crypto is risky. You can lose what you put in. But hopefully what you put in is something of value.

We are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone. But we are glad you were with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.