Doppler: A New Way to Launch Tokens with Austin Adams

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

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04David Hoffman?

  Austin Adams from Doppler. Does everyone need a token?

• 0:08Speaker 01

  I think everyone should launch at least one token in their lifetime.

• 0:11David Hoffman?

  I think crypto people are kind of looking for justification as to why we need more tokens, not less.

• 0:15Speaker 01

  I think we just need more things priced, right? Like, I think like 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 a 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 it, so it's hard for people to get the value for the things that they deserve.

• 0:41David Hoffman?

  There's a lot of meme coin pushback or valueless coin pushback, I think, from people because people are very wary about like the conduits for for grift in this 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 blockchains 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 ERC 20 token. And so, you know, what was the original token launchpad? It was actually Ethereum, like the ERC 20 token and the ICO meta, all of that. And then we made NFTs and then like true like launchpads came with pump fun.

• 1:26David Hoffman?

  And now we have, you know, 10,000 tokens being made a second. And so like, I understand that there's like meme coin, vapor token pushback, but you also, I think listeners and 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.

• 1:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think like I agree, definitely agree with that. I understand some people's pushback on meme coins. I think that they, so 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. And 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 chains 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 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 start like put shoehorning them into other things. And I think some will be extremely lindy. They'll be so about they'll be very valuable.

• 2:29Speaker 01

  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, it 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 to see what people will think it's worth and buying and selling it. And I think over time, the way that we conjoin 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.

• 3:14Speaker 01

  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's sort of just 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, it's fine.

• 3:29David Hoffman?

  Yeah, you you use the word conjoining. How do we conjoin a token to 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 meatspace legal system to conjoin value between something in the real world to a token. And then there's also like DeFi apps and DAOs. 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 we're, the idea is conjoined and that's very vapid, but nonetheless, it is there. And I think, yeah, I think like anytime we can find ways to conjoin things

• 4:11David Hoffman?

  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.

• 4:34Speaker 01

  Let's hope. I would say we're all hoping. Yeah. So I said, like, we work on, I, in the sea of Whetstone 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. There's 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 conjoined is 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 DAO or if

• 5:18Speaker 01

  it has creator fees, if it's just like nothing, if it's just like a regular like pump fun 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 customers, I would say. We have like the people who want to launch tokens and they want like highly specialized, you know, like white

• 6:02Speaker 01

  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, the technology and the pricing mechanisms they want to use. And our other sort of big customer is 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 it'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 were playing with their model and they have DAOs. And we sort of have like a lot of other people who are building on top of this.

• 6:45Speaker 01

  And we're letting them pick from a menu of things, messing with their market structures, 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 fill everything, the contracts to sort of the application or the contracts in 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 like build these very customized models and they have to think about all those things.

• 7:31Speaker 01

  They just think about like the app and the way their users interact with their own app. And I think like, 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 launchpad. It's just, 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 Legos and we want to build the seventh Lego or whatever. You know, everyone always says there's like six smart contracts that matter. We're trying to make sure the seventh one is customizable and everyone can use it.

• 7:58David Hoffman?

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• 8:40David Hoffman?

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• 9:24David Hoffman?

  costs. The best part, you don't have to do anything extra. Each trade is automatically routed through Uniswap X, V2, V3, and V4, so you get the most efficient swap without even thinking about it. Whether you're swapping, sending, on ramping, off ramping, or bridging, Uniswap's web app and wallet gives you the tools to unlock DeFi's full potential on Ethereum, base, Arbitrum, Unichain, and more. Use Uniswap's 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 this suite of tools, kind of just throwing everything at the wall, seeing what sticks, hoping the market kind of

• 10:05David Hoffman?

  finds what sticks. But you're not a token launchpad like Pump Fun. You are a build a launchpad workshop? Or how would you explain like I'm five this?

• 10:15Speaker 01

  I would say we're like a launchpad protocol. So you can build your own launchpad 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 launchpads on top of our thing. You're using the same code we're using. And we're sort of building our interface because like we've, we functionally had to build one to make sure that people could use it. And so we know we build, like we do like pretty traditional like meme coins 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 DAOs or building creator

• 10:58Speaker 01

  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 Ohara, every single time you build a, launch a token and you make an app, it has like a, you know, 10% of the token supply vests 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'd 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, is 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

• 11:42Speaker 01

  along the way, but it's like very clearly like a, it 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.

• 11:54David Hoffman?

  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 ERC20 for token for Solana, right? And so they just made the first ever token launchpad. Launch Lab, which is the radium competitor to Pump Fund, made Launch Lab. And it's not a launchpad, it's a launchpad launchpad. And, and so it lets you build your own launchpad so you can be the copy and paster of the Solana SP1 token contract. And then you can go compete with Pump Fund. And so now Launch Lab has, Launch Lab helps you launch launchpads to do the SP1. The problem with the SP1 is that it's very uncustomizable in the Solana lab. It's very great for copy and pasting

• 12:40David Hoffman?

  because it just operates on the same token contract. It's a simple 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 stablecoin on Solana that had yield. And it was just like a nightmare and they had to lobby the Solana 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, the ERC20 token incredibly customizable, incredibly 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.

• 13:21David Hoffman?

  So you are leveraging that fact about the ERC 20 token of its extensibility, its customizability. And you're creating a bunch of modules, attachments to the ERC 20 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?

• 13:49Speaker 01

  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, hundreds of thousands of ERC 20s at this point. But they're not in all ERC 20s, right? They're not in all of them. And another piece that we reuse a lot is our liquidity bootstrapping model. So we deploy like a pool for you, we initialize all, or I guess the protocol deploys it for you and initialize all of it.

• 14:18David Hoffman?

  Is that a balancer pool?

• 14:19Speaker 01

  No, it's a Uniswap pool. So we built a sort of like specialized Uniswap pool designed exactly for liquidity de-boost trapping. And pretty soon we're putting out a new version that's built even like leveraging Uniswap before pushing the bounds more on sort of like what can we? Like what, how can we take all of the thoughts away from all our integrators and make it just such as a contract call? So like right, 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.

• 15:03Speaker 01

  I think that's like how it should be. It shouldn't, you know, it's impossible. It's, 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 do 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. 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 them, just import them and use them. And so we're trying to do that for tokens, essentially the same thing. And yeah, I mean, like people reuse, we sort of

• 15:47Speaker 01

  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 feeds back to like creators and protocols, and then also like DAO tokens where you create a DAO 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 the LP, they get tokens over time. And so like those things are just like very unique to crypto. Like we're sort of, or 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

• 16:30Speaker 01

  very well trusted, very parameterizable code that anyone can pick from.

• 16:35David Hoffman?

  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'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 DAO tooling. But what I really mean by that is there were a lot of meme coins that were launched by Pump fun, AI16Z, for example. I've been using this example a lot on the podcast where it was just a meme coin, AI16Z. Ha ha, that's hilarious. We're making it 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 this project. And so they actually decided to, you know, start as a meme

• 17:19David Hoffman?

  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

• 18:00David Hoffman?

  coin while also have team shares at the same time. How do you fix this problem?

• 18:06Speaker 01

  That was something I actually was very aware of. I actually was aware of like a lot of these like meme coin teams are like, ah, 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 they just sort of hits a point where like exactly what you said, like there's like, they need some type of like corporate governance. And so every single token we launch on our interface has a DAO 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 DAO. 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, than people think they are. And

• 18:49Speaker 01

  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 DAOs today. So like right now, we have a DAO, it's called A and it like has, you know, I think it's had like $500,000 in vested or in tokens inside the DAO controlled by the DAO 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 like 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

• 19:31Speaker 01

  that grew from meme people like wanting to, they believe in the AI 16Z vision. They're like, this thing's cool. I want to like get into this. I believe in 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 DAOs. Like you don't, who cares? Like you don't have to, don't worry about the DAO.

• 19:53David Hoffman?

  Right, a DAO and a team.

• 19:54Speaker 01

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

• 20:16David Hoffman?

  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, 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 thing. So you're like, legal Zoom for token deployments.

• 20:49Speaker 01

  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, I, I, it's like, we have these like amazing on-chain. We have these amazing formation models, these primitives, and 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, we just try to build some stuff that'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, gonna vote on stuff and we're gonna like, mess with the parameters. And that's like, very, I think, very unique. It's, 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.

• 21:32Speaker 01

  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 val, like valuation, they expect the team to do things.

• 21:40David Hoffman?

  Okay, so that was the first, first problem I wanted to tackle. The second one is sniper bots. Because that is, that will completely F 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 like purpose bond that meme coin is gone. So how do you solve the sniper problem?

• 22:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I like, I was really on FriendTech really early and it was like very obvious that we call them static bonding curves. They're like bond, 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, you know, if you're on FriendTech 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 Pump sort of got a lot of inspiration as like sort of to a lot of people from the FriendTech's 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.

• 22:50Speaker 01

  And it was going to 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 adjusts 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, oh man, we missed the price. Let's increase the price a lot. Let's not sell as much. Let's move the price so that like 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 a two, you know, if you bond in two seconds or you bond in two days, it's the same.

• 23:33Speaker 01

  They don't, 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 the leave 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, Solana calls it like internet capital markets.

• 24:17Speaker 01

  I just think it's like on-chain capital formation. And I think like,

• 24:20David Hoffman?

  It's the same meme, it's just now, now it somehow got Solana coded. I'm, I'm, don't think it's Solana coded. That's the internet capital markets is what we've been doing in crypto from day one.

• 24:29Speaker 01

  Works, like, 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 got needs to this dynamic model. And I think like, sort of we built it for that.

• 24:52David Hoffman?

  So you're not eliminating, there's, I guess there's no way to eliminate snipers. What, 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 details.

• 25:07Speaker 01

  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 a hundred percent of the token immediately. You sell maybe like one or two percent of the token. And if people immediately raise 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 raise 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, and all these believe sales or something like that, like you'd only be selling very little. And the bonding curve sort of works by locking people in.

• 25:52Speaker 01

  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 a 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.

• 26:28David Hoffman?

  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 find, you do find the market clearing price quickly, sufficiently quick. It's not like a very slow static change over a long period of time, right?

• 26:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's all parameterizable. I mean, you could do sales over a year if you wanted to. I mean, that'd be kind of crazy, but you could also do sales over five minutes.

• 26:55David Hoffman?

  Eos did it.

• 26:56Speaker 01

  They did, and it worked very well for them.

• 26:57David Hoffman?

  It worked very well.

• 26:58Speaker 01

  I think about that one a lot. And it is a, I think, like, as we were sort of saying earlier, 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 gonna try a bunch of stuff and see which one works.

• 27:13David Hoffman?

  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 you're yoinking 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.

• 27:39Speaker 01

  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.

• 27:53David Hoffman?

  If you're impatient, you also lose money, right?

• 27:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, I guess you'd have to sell it back, and you'd sort of lose money. But yeah, 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.

• 28:17David Hoffman?

  Can I give you a bear 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 launchpad. And then the degens are like, haha, I like that meme. It's on PumpFun. I don't care about 30% slippage. Let me buy. And actually, optimizing for low IQ is actually the thing to do. What's your response?

• 28:44Speaker 01

  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 am, you're gonna put tokens in my protocol, I'm gonna get as much humanly out for you. And I would say that like, it's not, this is, it's a different user persona than Pump users. And I think like, people wanna, people are gonna go, I think like, these people who speculate, I don't think they really care about whether they're speculating. They just wanna speculate on the best things. They want to, they know if it's a company, if it's a meme, it's anything. Like, you just sort of give them

• 29:27Speaker 01

  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 wanna compete with them. I wanna compete on like, on sort of like, with centralized exchanges. And I wanna 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 wanna issue assets. And I wanna get like, that was like, you know, if you wanna issue on Pump, go do it. You know, if you think it's gonna 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, wanna launch a token over $100,000 in expected value.

• 30:07David Hoffman?

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• 30:50David Hoffman?

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• 31:34David Hoffman?

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• 32:16David Hoffman?

  Okay, is a public markets 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 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 dollars. 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 MEV and sniper bots, different kind of beast.

• 32:58David Hoffman?

  And so the maximum bull case, I'm hypothesizing here, is that some company, Blockworks, Blockworks goes public at, I don't know what.

• 33:08Speaker 01

  Hit my line, Mike.

• 33:09David Hoffman?

  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?

• 33:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, I would say that like, you know, public markets are actually like very inefficient and sort of IPOing is 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, 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 part, and a lot of that's due to mispricing. So there's a structural incentive for underwriters to misprice these IPOs. So like IPOs, I think are going to do worse, they underprice those. And then IPOs, I think they're going to do better, they don't reprice those. And so they're like structurally incentivized to not give you the best price. And so.

• 34:16David Hoffman?

  Seems like a racket.

• 34:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, so there's like, you know, you can look at the math is since 1980 or some, I think it's 1980 or 1990. Spreads on lit exchanges on the US 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. It'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 market structure.

• 35:01Speaker 01

  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 send to Dex's, like Dex first listings. That sort of changed, I think, the game a lot where like the structural incentives for, 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 a lot. 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

• 35:42Speaker 01

  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. I would 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 IPO 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.

• 36:28Speaker 01

  trillion dollar one. And that's like,

• 36:30David Hoffman?

  Right. And Max extracted on that.

• 36:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's sort of, I think, you know, the, your words, I guess, I'll let you say that.

• 36:38Speaker 01

  And so I would say that like, the people who are the most hurt by this are people who are not launching those hundred billion dollar companies. So the people who are launching the, you know, 10 million dollar companies, and that's like the, those are actually a very, very underserved market. They're extremely underserved and they are SMEs in the US or small, medium sized enterprises or there's many more of them than the, than I, sort of like large companies. And so it remains to be seen, like, maybe they are the ones who actually matter the most.

• 37:06David Hoffman?

  Interesting. Yeah. I was asking that question about like, the theoretical question about if Blockworks were to IPO using Doppler. Cause 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.

• 37:21Speaker 01

  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 bull and they're like being gate capped 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.

• 37:48David Hoffman?

  What is a seemingly obvious, low hanging fruit usage of your software that you are confused as to why no one has done that yet? Or what would you do next? If you're, if you could, if you were forced to stop working on Doppler and start using Doppler as an engineer, what would you go do?

• 38:06Speaker 01

  That's a good question. I think something I've really confused by, I think every single like interface that has

• 38:16Speaker 01

  distribution should have a token launcher in it at this point. Like, it's like 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,

• 38:30David Hoffman?

  Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

• 38:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, tell me.

• 38:32David Hoffman?

  If I have an own, if I own my users, so the readers of bankless.com.

• 38:37Speaker 01

  Give them a token launcher right now.

• 38:39David Hoffman?

  In like an article?

• 38:40Speaker 01

  Why not? I don't know.

• 38:41David Hoffman?

  In line? It's like, here's a token that goes with this article, like, how about it?

• 38:46Speaker 01

  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 buying them, they get a lot of attention. And so I think there should be more of them. I guess to actually answer your question, I would do Unisox Part 2 on Doppler. I like, I have a hat, we have these hats that we 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'd be kind of fun.

• 39:20David Hoffman?

  You'd do a tokenized fashion collab?

• 39:23Speaker 01

  That's-

• 39:24David Hoffman?

  With some sort of like influencer or distribution, you need distribution somehow.

• 39:27Speaker 01

  You do. I'm wearing my Kid Super stuff right now, so I think that-

• 39:30David Hoffman?

  Ah, dude, I missed my drop.

• 39:32Speaker 01

  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 Unisox collab. Because I think like, that's like the stuff that's cool.

• 39:43David Hoffman?

  Was it you that pilled Mike Appolito 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?

• 40:05Speaker 01

  I hope so. He has said, I did two podcasts with him, one about that. And I was like, very like, you know, every single thing's gonna be content. Or every single thing is gonna 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 Azora also did a lot of working on it. I think us two did very much destroy that man's brain, unfortunately, with the terms of content coins. But I think, you know, I think he would know. I think you would know as well, right? You guys are content creators. 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.

• 40:51Speaker 01

  And like, they should have more say over their monetization 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 it wasn't even related to like, an actually bad word, it was just sort of like- A bad hit like their algorithm that's like an AI bot 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 these content creators are creating things that are very valuable and they need to control their own sort of like destiny.

• 41:22David Hoffman?

  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, and then I go think of like, when we had like 5,000 people in a live stream between Eric Voorhees and Sam Bankman Freed. 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 permissionless of AVE and email.

• 42:04David Hoffman?

  And then there was this one moment where Eric Voorhees asked this very precise question. I think it was the AVE 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, to the concurrent viewers on the show, probably, probably. I would just imagine like a chart to go with all of the traffic that we had. I think, I think that would, I think that would be life in that chart, at least during the era of that live stream.

• 42:46Speaker 01

  I think so as well. And I would, you know, 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, the one in a thousand, 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 can be very valuable. And especially like, say you had an ad or something on the live Time 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 than what did that token.

• 43:27Speaker 01

  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 con, 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 still 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.

• 44:06David Hoffman?

  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?

• 44:15Speaker 01

  I think a lot of them did, did that. Uh, Van Gogh, I think was like the very famous one.

• 44:19David Hoffman?

  Van Gogh? Was Van Gogh like that?

• 44:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, he like very notoriously like exploded. Uh, and like, yeah, like no one cared about his stuff and it exploded afterwards and like, you know.

• 44:29David Hoffman?

  And imagine, imagine if like the incentive to like, if there's a Van Gogh tokenized his paintings, right? Like meme coined his paintings. This is hilarious.

• 44:38Speaker 01

  It's bullish. That's also bullish. I love that idea.

• 44:40David Hoffman?

  And then like, and then this one person stumbles across them 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, and then they're going to CTO Van Gogh. And then somebody just CTOs Van Gogh and discovers Van Gogh. And then all of a sudden. It turns out Van Gogh was 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.

• 45:08Speaker 01

  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.

• 45:19David Hoffman?

  And I think that that's like, that's probably actually like they just CTO'd 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.

• 45:28Speaker 01

  I think it's 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 reality loop and you captured out of it and the platform captured all of it.

• 46:08Speaker 01

  And you could have got some upside into it. And like, I, I think the actual big issue with a lot of these coins is people spend way too much money on them. Like I buy my Tencent 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 a thousand, hundreds of thousands of dollars of these coins and losing all of it.

• 46:31David Hoffman?

  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 the advertising revenue on a piece of content goes into buying back the token. Like if I, 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 sack. 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, the coupling of the token to real value capture.

• 47:15Speaker 01

  I think that's like what we think about all the time. It's like, how do you build something that like, I say that like meme coins inherently have no value. I wouldn't say they inherently, I think a lot of them actually do have value, but like, no, that's like the thing people say is like, these are valueless tokens. It's like, okay, we know we had value, so 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 in doing that. And they should be allowed to do that if they want to.

• 47:58Speaker 01

  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 a way such that like it's safe for all users.

• 48:11David Hoffman?

  Value bull tokens, in contrast to valueless 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 were 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 learned to make tokens. How do we make value bull 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 value bull tokens, which, like I said, is, I think, one of the reasons why we are all here.

• 48:55Speaker 01

  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. That's fine. Let people buy things they believe. Buy things you believe in and make money off of it. Like, that's like, that's the dream, I would say.

• 49:09David Hoffman?

  That's the whole thing. Awesome. Really great to bring you on. Really great to meet you, man.

• 49:13Speaker 01

  Appreciate it. It was a great chat with you as well.

• 49:15David Hoffman?

  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?

• 49:24Speaker 01

  If you want to issue a token or you want to integrate with our protocol, add a launchpad 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 as 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 want. And yeah, I'm on Twitter at AustinAdams10 and we're like, wetstone.cc is our like company Twitter where we like tweet about all of our products. And so you can sort of find us there.

• 49:50David Hoffman?

  Cool. Awesome. Thanks for coming on, my man.

• 49:51Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 49:52David Hoffman?

  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 Frontier. It's not for everyone, but we are glad you are with us on the Bankless journey. Thanks a lot.