We enable teams to build custom capital markets - token launches with real price discovery, configurable economics, and sustainable liquidity from day one. Projects like Zora and Bankr use Doppler because they need markets tailored to their specific assets and use cases they can continuously iterate on, not a one-size-fits-all launchpad thats expensive to audit and improve.

But Solana is different. And that's exactly why we're excited about coming over.

A Clear Vision for the Future

Solana not only clearly aims to increase bandwidth and reduce latency, it’s committed to shipping meaningful improvements such as expanding program call stack depth, enabling more meaningful and complex programs.

Cycle after cycle, builders we respect - teams with real products, real users, real novel ideas - keep showing up on Solana. The pattern is hard to ignore.

The community’s iteration speed is genuinely fast, capital is extremely active, yet the Solana protocol landscape hasn't kept pace with consumer innovation.

Doppler has been designed to close this gap, giving consumer teams building throughout the Solana ecosystem the infrastructure they need to build compelling, customized, market based applications and services that "just work".

We have a clear vision for the future.

Designing for the SVM

Going multichain on the EVM is straightforward. The contracts are the same, the tooling is the same, and deployment is mostly a configuration exercise at this point. We're live across multiple EVM chains and we power the majority of new token launches on Base, and our work on EVM will continue.

But Solana isn't that. The SVM has fundamentally different constraints - different assumptions, programming/accounting model, and economic challenges.

That's what makes it interesting.

We've already redesigned and rebuilt Doppler from first principles for the SVM.

Not a port. Not a fork. A native implementation designed around Solana's unique tradeoffs, with the same focus on customizability, ease of use, and economic sustainability that defines Doppler everywhere else.

We’re excited to share more details soon.

Build with Doppler

Are you building a protocol, application, or infrastructure on Solana?

Find a time here to speak with the team and learn more about Doppler on Solana.

We compress months of infrastructure work - token deployment, vesting, liquidity bootstrapping, governance, fee routing - into one unified interface, with price discovery auctions that protect launches from snipers and generate protocol-owned liquidity from day one.

Last year, we raised a $9 million seed round led by Pantera Capital, with participation from Variant, Figment Capital, and Coinbase Ventures.

In the 9 months since then, Doppler has become the default market infrastructure for new onchain assets. Over 90% of new DEX pools on Base now launch via Doppler, and our infrastructure powers the tokens being created on applications like Zora, Base App, Paragraph, FxHash, and more. 6 million pools have been deployed, representing 93% of Uniswap v4 pools on Base and 91% across all supported networks.

Teams launching tokens with Doppler have seen results: over 40,000 assets created daily, with over $1.5 billion in value and $1 billion in volume. Doppler gives teams the customization, distribution, and economics they want, letting them focus on applications rather than auctions.

We are here to fix markets

Capital formation has not fundamentally changed in 100 years. Since the IPO’s invention by JP Morgan, there has been nearly no innovation. So while the internet has touched nearly every other facet of human life, much of finance remains manual and skeuomorphic. 

Tokenization of markets will finish what electronification started in the 1990s - leaping forward in efficiency and creating new markets while simultaneously lowering costs and barriers.

I've spent my entire career thinking about how markets actually work, so it’s disappointing to keep seeing the same pattern: teams launch their own tokens and get destroyed. Not because they built bad products or communities, but because they got the launch mechanics wrong, lacked sufficient expertise, or didn’t give it the time and attention it deserved. 

The mechanism determines the outcome.

Customization, Not Complexity

Launching a token isn't like deploying a website. It's closer to running an IPO, except there are no banks, no underwriters, and no playbook. Teams spend months on launches, only to get them wrong.

Snipers drain value. Liquidity never materializes. Tokens are created in a way that doesn't get broad ecosystem support or exchange listings. The chart nukes on day two and never recovers.

When 80-90% of tokens want the same outcomes, but everyone continues to roll their own launches, something is wrong.

One-size-fits-all mechanisms were fine for the first generation of coins, where the whole game was the bubble. For legitimate projects, the ones building real products, raising real capital, the mechanism matters.

What Doppler Does

Doppler compresses weeks of infrastructure and smart contract development into a single, unified interface. Token deployment, vesting contracts, liquidity bootstrapping, and long-term DEX integration can be handled in less than 10 minutes. Teams configure launch parameters. Doppler does the rest.

With customized auctions for any asset type, Doppler’s infrastructure can handle tokenized equities, commodities, TGEs, content, art, creators, and ideas. All assets are tradeable on any interface supporting the underlying DEX, allowing users to get maximal distribution.

Our focus is on customization without complexity. Whatever your vesting schedule, fee structure, or revenue routing, Doppler handles exotic tokenomics while remaining simple enough that founders can launch in days instead of months.

Since our launch 9 months ago, 6 million pools have been deployed, representing 93% of Uniswap v4 pools on Base and 91% across all supported networks. That is over 40,000 assets daily. We’ve created an estimated over $1.5 billion in value with assets that have done over $1 billion in volume. 

We’re already trusted by serious teams, and our funding round enables us to expand into self-serve markets, larger TGE’s, and significantly more integrations.

We’re already the default infrastructure for coins on Base, and our mission is to become the default infrastructure for entirely new asset classes that couldn’t have existed before.

Our team includes engineers with experience at Uniswap, Primitive Finance, and Aztec. We’ve built AMMs at scale and we spend all our time on a single question: How do we help people own assets they believe in?

Doppler helps you build apps, not auctions.

If you’re a team looking to launch onchain, book a 15 minute discovery call to learn more about how Doppler can help: https://calendly.com/cooper-whetstone/discovery-call 

“Financial markets are increasingly becoming internet native. One size-fits-all token launchpads and liquidity bootstrapping protocols have failed to meet the needs of token creators and their communities. Developers increasingly want onchain markets with application-specific customizations. We introduce Doppler Multicurve, a new primitive for onchain issuance that enables multiple price curves to be specified during an initial auction or liquidity bootstrapping phase, which can then be tailored to a specific use case or application’s needs. In doing so, developers have the expressivity necessary to reduce maximal extractable value (MEV), and enable more capital-efficient liquidity formation."  

🔗 Read the Doppler Multicurve Whitepaper

About Multicurve 

Over the past few months, the Zora team has been leveraging a custom implementation of Doppler Multicurve to power their application’s novel content and creator markets. This technology easily enables the creation of customized trading markets for individual pieces of content (such as specific posts on Zora) as well as creator profiles (individual creators on the platform). These content markets have been seamlessly integrated across the Base ecosystem, including within The Base App.

Today, we're thrilled to bring Multicurve support to the broader developer community, opening up the best onchain price discovery and liquidity bootstrapping mechanisms to new asset classes.

Introducing the Doppler Multicurve "Initializer"

The Doppler Protocol now includes a "Multicurve Initializer" smart contract that gives developers and coin creators more fine-tuned control over price curves during initial token auctions, using Uniswap v4. Once tokens reach their parameterized goals - such as bootstrapping a specific amount of liquidity - the proceeds can be seamlessly migrated from the Multicurve Initializer to different versions of Uniswap, building liquidity in the most widely integrated DEX.

This new version of Doppler offers significant improvements over legacy onchain market structures and enables quicker iterations and market optimizations post-integration.

Developer tools

Doppler Multicurve is now supported within the official Doppler TypeScript SDKs. For integrators that are already utilizing the v4 SDK, configuring multicurve should be less than a 10 line change to your parameterization. For new integrations, get started with the latest alpha SDK. 

🚨 Open source Indexer and Demo Application support for Doppler Multicurve is coming soon. Follow along on the Whetstone Research GitHub or Paragraph blog to get the latest updates. 

Supported networks

Doppler Multicurve is now deployed to Base Sepolia for teams to begin integration and testing. Mainnet deployments are coming soon. View the Doppler protocol smart contract addresses.

About Doppler

Doppler is a smart contract protocol developed by Whetstone Research to power custom token launches. It is used by industry leading applications like Zora, Paragraph, and Coop Records, enabling efficient application specific markets. Doppler is available on Base, Ink, and Unichain, with other Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) network deployments coming soon. 

Acknowledgements

Multicurve was originally designed and developed in collaboration with Zora’s protocol engineering team, including Rohan Kulkarni. Doppler Multicurve was implemented by Austin Adams and Clement Lakhal at Whetstone Research. Security review by 0xKaden. 

TLDR

Whetstone Research is excited to introduce Doppler404 - an extension to the Doppler Protocol. Doppler404 enables token creators to issue assets with unified liquid markets by bridging the gap between non-fungible tokens (ERC-721) and fungible tokens (ERC-20). This provides automated price discovery, sniping mitigation, a unified liquid market, and an improved trading UX over traditional NFTs - in addition to expanding the utility of fungible tokens for a variety of key use cases. Doppler404 is now available for integrations with TypeScript SDK support and a fully featured demo application.

How it works

Creation

During creation, users can easily define a custom quantity of fungible tokens that result in NFT ownership as inputs into the Doppler protocol contracts. For example you can now easily build an application where holding 100 of a specific fungible token, eg. $ABC, can result in holding an NFT from an art collection called ABC. Simply put, creators no longer have to choose between creating an NFT or fungible token.

Pricing

Pricing initial NFT or even other coin offerings has historically been a challenge for creators. Pricing too low leaves money on the table, whereas pricing aggressively may upset potential purchasers or loyal community members. Creators can now easily utilize Doppler's static or dynamic auctions in order to find the appropriate values with sophisticated onchain pricing mechanisms, just like Zora creators or content.

Swapping & collecting

If the NFT is traded away, or a sufficient quantity of the associated fungible token is swapped, the balance of the other associated asset will proportionately decrease. This means that Doppler404 based NFTs can always be sold in the form of fractionalized fungible tokens. Through their usage of Doppler, those fungible tokens have best in class price discovery, liquidity bootstrapping and support on AMMs, like Uniswap. This enables the Doppler auction to bootstrap a single market structure providing NFT holders an onchain pool that they can always sell into collectivizing floor price liquidity, essentially providing a traditional DEX or even memecoin-like trading experience to NFT collections.

Getting started examples

Applications, wallets, and exchanges can now integrate Doppler404 to enable creation of fungible and non-fungible tokens with unified market structures for entirely novel user experiences. It is just as easy as integrating any other JavaScript/TypeScript library and can significantly expedite time to market.

Install the TypeScript

pnpm add @whetstone-research/doppler-sdk viem

Doppler quickstart

import { DopplerSDK } from '@whetstone-research/doppler-sdk';
import { createPublicClient, createWalletClient, http } from 'viem';
import { base } from 'viem/chains';

// Set up viem clients
const publicClient = createPublicClient({
  chain: base,
  transport: http(),
});

const walletClient = createWalletClient({
  chain: base,
  transport: http(),
  account: '0x...', // Your wallet address
});

// Initialize the SDK
const sdk = new DopplerSDK({
  publicClient,
  walletClient,
  chainId: base.id,
});

Configure a dynamic auction with Doppler404

const dynamicBuilder = new DynamicAuctionBuilder()
  .tokenConfig({
    type: 'doppler404' as const,
    name: data.tokenName,
    symbol: data.tokenSymbol,
    baseURI: data.baseURI || `https://metadata.example.com/${data.symbol}/`,
  })
  .saleConfig({ initialSupply, numTokensToSell })
  .poolConfig({ fee: 3000, tickSpacing: 8 })
  .auctionByTicks({
    startTick, endTick,
    minProceeds: parseEther("100"),
    maxProceeds: parseEther("600"),
    durationDays: 7,
    epochLength: 3600,
  })
  .withMigration({
    type: 'uniswapV4', fee: 3000, tickSpacing: 60,
    streamableFees: {
      lockDuration: 60 * 60 * 24 * 30,
      beneficiaries: []
    }
  })
  .withGovernance({ useDefaults: true })
  .withUserAddress(account.address)
  .withIntegrator()
  .withTime({ blockTimestamp: Number(adjustedTimestamp) })
  .build();

View the SDK with support for Doppler404: https://github.com/whetstoneresearch/doppler-sdk-alpha

Doppler404 Demo Application

The react based Doppler Demo Application now supports creation, swapping, and exploring Doppler404 tokens in order to help application developers get started and into production as quickly as possible.

View the code & get started: https://github.com/whetstoneresearch/doppler-demo-app

Review the Doppler404 integration into the demo app https://github.com/whetstoneresearch/doppler-demo-app/blob/5b9de3d459073b06f97dcc30a257b754b8ab9413/src/pages/CreatePool.tsx#L171

Modifying DN404 & ERC-7631

Doppler404 builds on top of the foundation of “DN404”, aka ERC-7631 for “Dual Nature Token Pairs", authored in February 2024. With a few modifications, Doppler extends the DN404 token standard allowing users to freeze their token balances, providing what we believe to be a missing user experience improvement over traditional DN404/ERC-7631 tokens, in addition to Doppler's other benefits.

Balance (or asset) freezing is unique to Doppler404, meaning that users can never accidentally trade away NFTs that they wish to hold. This scenario may have previously arisen with some edge cases on DN404 tokens, specifically in the event a user is holding an NFT they do not wish to sell, but swapped away a sufficient number of fungible tokens to reduce their NFT holdings.

Ecosystem & network support

Doppler404 is available today on the Base Sepolia test network. It is permissionlessly ready for integrations with any third party applications with support from the latest Doppler SDK which is now available in alpha, in addition to the Doppler Demo App. Production Mainnet deployments are coming in September 2025. Support from Pure Markets and other novel applications are expected 🔜

Request new network support 

If you are building &/or working on an EVM compatible network interested in support for Doppler404, please reach out to the Whetstone Research team by sending an email to contact@whetstone.cc.

The benefits of fungibility

Austin Adams and z80 recently published a paper on the benefits of fungibility. It is recommended reading if you are interested in learning more about why this is an improvement over traditional NFT market structures and ultimately an important extension to the Doppler protocol we're excited about.

Acknowledgements

Shoutout to the authors of DN404 & EIP-7631, including: vectorized (@vectorized), Thomas (@0xth0mas), Quit (@quitcrypto), Michael Amadi (@AmadiMichael), cygaar (@cygaar), and Harrison (@pop-punk). Additionally a big thank you to everyone who has contributed to the open source implementation.

Doppler404 was designed and implemented by z80.

With an intuitive API interface and familiar builder pattern, developers now get configuration specific errors related to their Doppler launches. This helps ensure integrators are implementing a valid configuration such as their auction parameters, migration destinations, and governance contracts.

Now available in alpha on the following test networks: Base, Ink, Unichain, Arbitrum, and Monad.

SDK Examples

Configure token metadata and auction details

Configure (optional) governance

Configure (optional) vesting

Configure post auction AMM migration

Give SDK feedback

The Doppler SDK is open source and now available in alpha. Feedback is greatly appreciated

Please file issues within the GitHub repository or join Discord and send us a message

New demo application now available

A new open source demo application written in react implementing the latest SDK is now available, showcasing just how easy it is to get started building applications with Doppler.

View the code: https://github.com/whetstoneresearch/doppler-demo-app

Get in touch

Interested in building with Doppler or having Doppler deployed to your network? You can permissionlessly get started today, documentation and contract addresses are available here If you’re interested in learning more, have questions, or are inquiring about a potential business collaboration, send an email to contact@whetstone.cc

About Doppler 

Doppler is a smart contract protocol developed by Whetstone Research to power custom token launches. It is used by industry leading applications like Zora, Paragraph, and Coop Records, enabling efficient application specific markets. Doppler is available on Base, Ink, and Unichain, with other Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) network deployments coming soon. 

TLDR

• Paragraph is a blogging platform designed with internet native economics in mind 

• Posts are published on immutable, peer-to-peer, storage networks, like Arweave

• Previously, readers could mint and collect non-fungible tokens for posts they enjoyed

• Now with Doppler, each post can have an associated fungible token that anyone can buy

About Paragraph

Paragraph has long been the top platform for crypto-native teams and authors exploring alternative economic models for monetizing their ideas. The platform has attracted notable thinkers, including Fred Wilson from Union Square Ventures, who powers his blog through the platform. We also use Paragraph at Whetstone Research to publish most of our research – our writing can be found at https://paragraph.com/@whetstone. In 2024, Paragraph and Mirror joined forces, consolidating two of the most respected and adopted web3 publishing platforms.

Problems in publishing 

The Paragraph team has great articulations of why the publishing industry needs a new business model. As stated on their website: 

“Ideas – in the form of stories, insights, questions, or memes – shape worldviews, bring people together, and grow richer with each conversation. For ideas to be shared, they need to be valued and rewarded. For ideas to have an impact, they must be seen and discussed. But today’s internet makes both harder than ever.

• Paid subscriptions force writers into full-time publishing — a path that isn’t feasible or desirable for many

• Paywalls restrict readership, limit audience growth, and weaken the reach of important ideas.

• Sponsorships and click-based ads dilute authenticity, harm the reading experience, and distract writers from their craft.

• Platforms maximize ad impressions, not discovery, quality, and thoughtful discourse, creating a continuous race for the bottom.

The result? We fall short of what’s truly possible: a vibrant ecosystem where ideas flourish and a thriving economy that enables more great writing to reach the world. We believe there's a better way.”

- The Paragraph Team

Doppler-based content coins 

Paragraph has previously released multiple iterations on the economic models for how to reward those with good ideas published to their platform, with a majority of them focused on NFTs as a way to show patronage or support for a given author. In these models, authors could set specific minting fees for collecting their posts. They did not earn any of the long term trading fees of these collectibles when swapped on secondary marketplaces like OpenSea. In the latest release, Paragraph has decided to use Doppler, a smart contract protocol created by us at Whetstone Research, to create fungible tokens associated with each piece of content, or blog.

Doppler was designed from the ground up to create application, use case, or token specific markets. These markets ensure value can be accrued to the creators and token holder community in a sustainable way that makes sense for various diverse use cases. In this model with Doppler, the author of a Paragraph post owns a percentage of the total token supply. Additionally, the authors own a claim on a liquidity provider (LP) position, meaning that the author earns fees every time that the tokens are swapped in their unique Uniswap pool, which the Doppler smart contracts created.  This is a radically new attempt to create new financial markets for ideas worth sharing, and we’re very excited to see it being built on Doppler.

How it works

Step 1) Authors account with email (via Privy), Farcaster, or connect an Ethereum wallet 

Step 2) Authors write their latest and greatest ideas to share with the world

Step 3) Authors publish ideas and a unique, fungible token associated with their content 

Step 4) After publication, your readers show patronage via purchasing the blog's coin

Step 5) Authors earn trading fees, even through third party interfaces

Doppler implementation details

Paragraph is using Doppler's static bonding curve to price content (aka Doppler “v3”),  starting as low as ~$750. The post’s author holds a 10% percentage of the total supply, vested over one year. As demonstrated in the user journey and screenshots above, Paragraph's opinionated defaults abstract away this complexity into a neat experience that looks like patronage, with various levels of showing support for an author. 

Conclusion 

Paragraph's team rebuilt their market infrastructure from non-fungible token-based collections to fungible content coins for each post using Doppler in just a few weeks. This transformation gives creators a new mechanism for directly owning their content and monetizing it throughout its lifecycle, including earning from every swap. The result is a novel multidimensional onchain social graph that encourages new audiences to participate in the marketplace of ideas beyond simple patronage and collectibles. By entering these micro-financial markets early, readers can earn alongside the authors they love and support. While we're still in the beginning stages of valuing internet-native content, we believe Paragraph's marketplace for ideas shows promise.

This post is published on Paragraph. Buy its blogcoin to show support!

Start building custom markets today

Whetstone Research is here to help other teams integrate Doppler and customize their market structures to their applications. Get in touch with the team to learn more - contact@whetstone.cc

Resources

Discord

Documentation

Demo application

Doppler's design supports creating assets with both very low initial market capitalizations, such as $22 in Zora's case, or with previously established market capitalizations based on other data, such as external pricing events, like previous sales. Now with dynamic bonding curves built on top of Uniswap v4, Doppler better supports the creation of valuable assets with currently unknown market prices - driven by every user of the internet. Using a market driven approach utilizing onchain dutch auctions, dynamic bonding curves with Doppler Core provides best in class MEV protection, making it more difficult for bots to snipe tokens at cheap prices, while ensuring tokens maximize capital efficiency along the way.

Teams can now begin implementing Doppler Core within their own applications, and use it to manage the entire lifecycle of token issuance, not just dynamic bonding curves, including:  

1. Creating any kind of asset onchain

2. Auctioning the asset off at specified prices

3. Bootstrapping liquidity into popular AMMs

4. Graduating tokens to trigger downstream actions

5. Earn trading fees when the assets are swapped

6. Managing long term treasuries with vesting and voting

In effort to make Doppler as easy as possible to integrate, we are releasing an open source TypeScript SDK and react based demo application for Doppler "v4" which implements dynamic bonding curves.

v4 TypeScript SDK & Indexer

The Doppler smart contracts are available onchain for anyone to interact with directly, but software developers do not need to know Solidity or a special purpose programming language to be able to integrate the latest token creation strategies. Doppler Core has an open source TypeScript SDK and indexer, now supporting v4 dynamic bonding curves with a familiar developer experience. 

https://github.com/whetstoneresearch/doppler-sdk 

v4 Demo application

In addition to the TypeScript SDK, there is now an open sourced react based web application that implements the Doppler v4 SDK and provides a canonical reference to Doppler Core integrators.

https://github.com/whetstoneresearch/doppler-v4-miniapp 

Upcoming deployments

Doppler Core now supports the world's first “dynamic bonding curve” available in production, and is deployed to Base, Ink, and Unichain, with support for other production networks coming soon. Doppler enables developers to focus on building uniquely compelling applications, not auctions. If you're building an application on an Ethereum Virtual Machine based network and would like to integrate Doppler, but it is not currently available on your network of choice, please get in touch with the team to help prioritize.

Resources

Doppler Website

Doppler Discord

Doppler Whitepaper

We are very excited to share the upcoming roadmap. 

We hope that you choose to build the future of financial markets with us ♥

Completed to date:

• ✅Doppler whitepaper release

• ✅Doppler developer documentation release

• ✅Doppler SDK & indexer open sourced

• ✅Audit from OpenZeppelin

• ✅Audit from Certora

• ✅Audit contest with Cantina

• ✅Doppler singlecurve release

• ✅Deployment on Unichain

• ✅Pure markets website integration

• ✅Deployment on Ink

• ✅Deployment on Base

• ✅Bug bounty program with Cantina

• ✅Ohara appcoin integration

• ✅Zora contentcoin integration

• ✅Doppler Multicurve whitepaper release

• ✅Doppler website release

The Doppler Airlock makes it seamless to integrate other downstream smart contract protocols that benefit the token issuance lifecycle and make these optionally available to developers. Some of these may include novel sybil resistance mechanisms that can reduce spam or MEV during the auction or initial issuance. A significant portion of the Doppler roadmap aims to provide a seamless, programmable experience for the initial distribution of assets, as well as their ongoing governance and long term alignment between ecosystem participants.

Next to be released:

• Doppler Core

  • Full support for Dutch Auction Dynamic Bonding Curves with Uniswap v4

  • “Bring your own” network and protocol tokens to auction from other contracts 

    • Start auctions at customizable, existing market prices 

• Doppler Optimized for Mainnet Ethereum (DOME)

• Explorers integrations

• Data visualization platforms integrations

• Treasury tool integrations 

Always ongoing: 

• Additional demo applications

• Additional application integrations

• Deployments to popular Layer-1's

• Deployments to popular Layer-2's

• Developer experience improvements

Doppler aims to be deployed anywhere with existing user bases or compelling developer demand. If you work at a foundation or on a specific project and are interested in integrations or collaborations with Doppler, such as deploying to your protocol, please get in touch at contact@whetstone.cc or to a team member directly. 

Future plans (subject to change):

• New novel auction dynamics

• Sybil resistance modules

• Airdrop protocol modules

• Lending protocol modules

• More flexible governance structures

• Customizable fee & MEV redistribution

Notably this does not include every designed or planned feature, improvement, nor integration. Rather it aims to provide directional insight to communities interested in building with Doppler so they can make more informed decisions about their own integration roadmaps. Additionally this serves as a vehicle by which teams can request other items they’d love to see prioritized. 

The roadmap will be published and maintained within the Doppler Documentation. 

If you have questions, feedback, or there are other things you would like to see as part of the Doppler Roadmap, please reach out to the team directly, or join the Doppler Discord!

Doppler is a new liquidity bootstrapping protocol and hub of onchain value creation, bringing together protects, users, and traders on any chain into one immutable, incentive-aligned layer. It’s a novel design to set prices - when you launch a token, there is a self-executing initial pricing auction, designed to capture the most amount of value for the tokens deposited into it. 

The Protocol is core infrastructure meant to be built on top of, letting even non-crypto native teams incorporate Doppler into their projects with a few simple clicks and allowing more value (with less MEV) to flow to tokens. Launched initially on Unichain, Doppler is now on Ink and available for integration today using the open-source interface and SDK. Documentation can be found here.

The decision to bring Doppler to multiple chains stems from the Protocol-first approach that the team has. Users and builders want to grow with the chains they are on, and infrastructure should adapt to the needs of users already on that chain. By going to where users and builders are, Doppler accelerates the growth of the chain, the users, and the Protocol itself.  

Ink, incubated by the Kraken team, is a clear example of a premier centralized exchange going headfirst onchain. Ink wants to accelerate the adoption of defi globally and utilize Kraken's crypto expertise to empower builders. We look forward to working closely with builders in the ecosystem and eventually onboard users directly into defi markets. 

Whetstone Research is proud to be a part of the community building this future. Doppler was created, audited, and launched in just 9 months by our talented team. As a protocol studio, our mission is to take big ideas from 0 to 1, with innovative design and the highest safety standards. If you’re interested in working with our team, get in touch at contact@whetstone.cc or reach out to any of the team members directly.

A common criticism of onchain markets is that there are no “real projects” - we disagree. Billions of dollars in value is created each year from users swapping, lending, and utilizing blockspace. These are core financial primitives that users and builders clearly value. 

While regulatory uncertainty once favored anonymous, short-term projects over sustainable builders, we're entering a new era. Our vision is to bridge this gap with the Doppler Protocol, creating an environment where both established projects and emerging innovations can thrive.

We believe in a crypto ecosystem that embraces both utility and creativity. From memecoins that capture cultural moments to “product coins” that power real applications, there's room for every project that brings value to users. What matters is having the right infrastructure to support their growth – and that's exactly what Doppler provides. 

Doppler and Pure

Permissionless capital formation is the superpower of crypto. Anyone, anywhere, at any time can both create and purchase tokens for an asset, app, or meme that they believe in. The Doppler Protocol isn't just participating in this new paradigm - we’re hoping to accelerate it.

Projects want capital to build and grow, users want to support projects they believe in, and traders want to capitalize on a project’s success. Doppler connects all these participants in one immutable, incentive-aligned layer. 

The Doppler Protocol aims to be the hub of onchain value creation. This audited, permissionless layer of infrastructure allows more value to flow to token projects, a deeper Uniswap integration, and less MEV harming all users of the Protocol. This is done via a sophisticated onchain auction that is totally abstracted from users that anyone can be on in just a few lines of code.

The code is public, has been extensively audited, and is launching today on Unichain. Other chains are coming soon, based on interest, user demand, and community feedback.

We are also debuting the first application on Doppler: Pure. Pure is the first front-end to access Doppler - a streamlined interface to create any kind of token, as well as swap and explore markets, built by a team of Uniswap core contributors who have deep understanding and expertise in AMMs. This interface is ready today for people who want to use the Doppler Protocol. But it’s just one example of what can be done. From AI memecoins, to game tokens, to DAOs, our end goal is to make token creation better, safer, and less extractive for users.

What’s Next

Builders everywhere should be empowered to create assets of value instead of funnelling it to offchain entities. Keeping more value onchain will only accelerate onchain price discovery and capital formation.

To accelerate this growth, we are happy to announce that Whetstone raised $1.3 million in our pre-seed round from Variant, Nascent, Credibly Neutral, Uniswap Ventures, Ambush, and Figment, plus a host of great angels. We’ve also built a team of experienced Protocol engineers with more to come.

Next is building the pieces that empower builders and users everywhere. Just as automated market makers and over-collateralized lending removed middlemen from exchanging and lending, Doppler allows projects to bootstrap liquidity without the need for middlemen or market makers. Tokenization is the future, and the easier we can make it to move and retain value onchain, the better off we’ll all be. 

More on that to come.

• Rapidly create new high-quality liquidity applications - on top of the permissionless, credibly-neutral, self-executing, and autonomous base layer of Doppler. These tools are going to power the future of onchain markets, and they must be built on a durable base.

• Let projects outsource the difficult part of getting a price for their token. The Protocol automatically runs an auction utilizing market feedback, and the end result is a token price that you know is aligned with the market without losing significant token value from MEV.

For those who are interested in seeing the code, then go check out our public GitHub repo for the smart contracts: https://github.com/whetstoneresearch/doppler

Doppler’s code is designed to evolve, meaning this is just the start of what is possible . To build sustainable infrastructure, we’re committed to making sure it's done safely. While we’ve already done three audits of the code, today we’re publishing the code and running a Cantina competition -- inviting the best of crypto to do their worst and help us ensure the protocol is fully battle-tested.

We’re also publishing the code now, before its deployment, to support projects who want to build on it. Whetstone Research is a team of people who are truly committed to the decentralized, permissionless systems. The plan is not just to allow people to bootstrap liquidity to their token projects, but for Doppler to also bootstrap a decentralized ecosystem. 

As you’ll see in the code, the Protocol leaves significant value for integrators via a protocol-enshrined “integrator fee.” Similar to an “LP fee” in the Uniswap Protocol, projects who integrate with Doppler can set a capped fee that they earn at the end of a successful bootstrapping process -- allowing Doppler to create a decentralized network of user interfaces and projects building on top of it, ensuring these projects to capture value day one, and enabling sustainable teams that are incentivized to focus solely on the protocol.

Doppler was originally designed to deploy as a hook on Uniswap v4, but there is a clear need today. After all, inefficient liquidity integrations on Solana alone have taken $400m to date from token’s value. So post-audit, our plan is to deploy immediately on Uniswap v3 and then to move forward on v4 once it’s released.

Thanks to the Cantina team and everyone who joins the competition to help finalize Doppler’s security audit. We can’t wait to see what tokens and projects it helps launch. If you are interested in integrating or collaborating, reach out to contact@whetstone.cc , @whetstonedotcc on Twitter, read the whitepaper here, or sign up here to be notified of the public release of the SDK and integration docs. 

Doppler is a protocol designed for price discovery and liquidity generation for any asset. Say you’ve had a great idea for a token project, you’ve put together the team you need, but now you need to set a price and generate enough liquidity to enable swapping for your token. Doppler utilizes the entire global market to do that for you without any intervention on your side.

Any project can deposit their tokens into Doppler -- no minimum, just enough to attract the market. The protocol uses those tokens for two purposes:

1. Doppler sets the right price.

   • Doppler runs continuous auctions to gather market information and tweaks the price until it hits the right level -- and it fluctuates based on the market forces.

2. Doppler sources your initial liquidity.

   • Instead of your project having to provide the total initial liquidity, Doppler runs these auctions and converts any proceeds into whatever other asset you want your pool to have (ETH, etc.).

With Doppler, any builder can use a high-quality, audited, permissionless protocol for pricing their assets or generating revenue from a token. The moment a token is created on Doppler, it is immediately tradeable on any trading interface integrated with onchain markets like Uniswap, 1inch, Matcha, or CowSwap.

While you can read more about the mechanics in our Doppler whitepaper, the beauty is that the process is facilitated entirely inside the protocol, requiring no action on your end. It just works.

Value is all around us. Think about the web2 model. Facebook has (or had) your attention. It was able to place a value on that attention and sell it to advertisers, who in turn profited off of what that ad drove you to purchase. And as the middleman, Facebook is able to exert control and make a handsome profit. In web3 and crypto, we know we want to get rid of these centralized middlemen. What we struggle with is how to set an accurate price for most assets.

All the pieces of onchain native value creation are already here. Core financial activity is now possible completely onchain, and we are seeing it create real value. Right now, that value is able to flow directly to assets through decentralized financial systems — all of which is done inside of immutable smart contract code. But the prices are still set and initial funding is provided through incredibly traditional ways — a system essentially based on what rich people or institutions you know.

More and more value will be built as the financial system and everything around it become increasingly onchain and tokenized. The Blackrocks of the world know it and are ready to capitalize. But how do we actually realize a world where we actually lower barriers to entry and give everyone a fair shot?

That’s the power of Doppler. We’re building toward a future where anyone anywhere can create value in what they build, and earliest users are able to capture this value.

At Whetstone, we are building products that touch every part of an assets lifecycle — from issuance and liquidity provision to exchange and utilization.

In just a few months, the team has designed and built Doppler, an entirely new onchain primitive, from inception to a fully-audited codebase. We are planning to deploy the full Doppler version when Uniswap v4 is finalized. We are currently testing out a version with fewer features that is compatible with v3. If you would like to build on top of this, then reach out to us!

The future of onchain finance will require us to answer some of the most difficult financial problems the world has encountered. We will continue to build technology that allows us and other teams to build onchain value.

TL;DR 

• This proposal analyzes decreasing Uniswap v3 market share on Base to Aerodrome, and conjectures that a core input into that change in market share is Aerodrome’s 4bp fee tier ETH/USDC pool. The pool undercuts Uniswap v3’s 5bp fee tier pool. 

• We propose the creation of 2, 3, and 4 bps fee tiers on Base in order to win back DEX market share from Aerodrome.

Primer

The Uniswap Protocol has long since been the dominant AMM trading venue in EVM markets. The crown jewel of this trading is the ETH/USDC pool on Ethereum mainnet. The pool between ETH/USD trading pairs is the most important pool within a chain’s ecosystem because it represents the transition between flight-to-safety and risk-taking. 

Most other pools within the AMM ecosystem utilize ETH as their pair asset. Pools generally do this, because ETH is correlated with most assets trading on blockchain-based markets. However, ETH is by definition not correlated with USDC, thus making it the most difficult pair to provide liquidity for in AMM markets.

On July 27th, Aerodrome ETH/USDC overtook both the Uniswap ETH/USDC both on Base and Ethereum - marking the first time for this newcomer DEX.

Jesse Pollak (jesse.xyz) 🛡️

@jessepollak

. @base now has the top EVM volume pair

926

11:49 AM • Jul 27, 2024

One could say that Aerodrome has now entered the decentralized exchange thunderdome. Many have asked why has Aerodrome seen such a surge in volumes and what new technologies has it used to get here?

General DEX Marketshare

Across EVM chains, the Uniswap Protocol is by far the dominant trading protocol. While the volume share of the protocol shifts day to day and in different market conditions, the share generally sits around 50%.

On Base specifically, the share of the Uniswap Protocol by volume is around the same, but has generally been trending downward from highs above 80% to most recently below 40% since April 28th.

As we can see from the chart above, there is a stark difference between the Uniswap Protocol + Aerodrome vs. the other DEXs. We will focus only on those two protocols for the rest of the piece.

Share by Volume

The volume of Uniswap Protocol on Base has not seen a huge decrease. The majority of the change in volume share is actually from Aerodrome’s increase in volume. 

The increase in volume from Aerodrome can mainly be attributed to their introduction of their “Slipstream Protocol”, which is a self-described Uniswap v3 fork, which made “only strictly necessary changes to the existing implementation due to the complexity and risk of introducing any regressions or potential security issues.”

Aerodrome Volume by Pool

The USD volume from Aerodrome is concentrated around one singular pool, which is their ETH/USDC 4 bps pool, which is shown in black. Over 70% of the entire volume share of the protocol comes from this pool. The next highest pool has 6.4%, which is the 4 bps ETH/USD+ pool.

Uniswap Protocol Volume by Pool

This is in great contrast to the USD volume share of the Uniswap Protocol on Base, which has the largest pool at 28.4%. This is the ETH/USDC 5 bps pool, which is also shown in black. For reference, the large orange share (labeled 52.4%) above is all pools outside of the top 10 combined.

Observant readers will notice the difference between these two pools right away - the Aerodrome ETH/USDC pool has a 4 bps fee while the Uniswap v3 pool has a 5 bps fee. Because most retail users have nearly 0 price impact on their trades, liquidity differences between the two pools will not bring back flow. This is because the fee from the trade dominates the cost of trading on that pool. Liquidity mining alone will not bring back the flow. For the rest of this piece, we will focus on the ETH/USDC pools on both of the protocols.

Most retail users’ trades are semi-sophisticated because they use interfaces to find the best routes for their trades. Because of this, the difference in 1 bp will cause sophisticated interfaces to choose Aerodrome over Uniswap.

To test this, we labeled the top 400 interface contracts by volume as either retail or non-retail (ie MEV). We checked where interfaces were routing their volume to and how much volume is from arbitrage volume (volume routed from MEV bots). These lists can be seen in the queries below.

Our sample is over the last 14 days as of the time of writing. On Uniswap Protocol, $293m of retail flow went into Uniswap v3. On Aerodrome, $425m of retail flow went into their Protocol. This is about a 45% difference in retail flow. This is significant, but the difference is not without a cost. 

The higher fee tier of the pool protects LPs more from arbitrage losses. For reference, the arbitrage volumes on Aerodrome are $2.18b while the Uniswap Protocol was $588m, almost a 4 times increase. While there is a retail volume difference, the volume generated from arbitrage is massively different as well.

Notice that while Aerodrome has higher retail volumes, the arbitrage volumes are also significantly higher. More importantly, the volume of non-retail trades is proportionately much more than on Uniswap Protocol. This means much more of the flow that the LPs of Aerodrome are taking is worse. Because fee-tiers are inversely proportional to arbitrage losses, while the difference between 4 bps and 5 bps may seem small, the inverse relationship combined means the impact of these fee differences is super-linear.

ETH/USDC volume categorized by originator on Aerodrome

ETH/USDC volume categorized by originator on Uniswap v3

Not all flow is equal, and more volumes may not necessarily be better for LPs. However, there is also evidence that Layer 2 Protocols significantly lower losses and increase LP capital efficiency - this is due to lower blocktimes and lower fees. Because of this, the market clearing fee for LPs on L2s may actually be lower than 5 bps. Because Uniswap v3 has fee-tiers chosen by governance + the initial deployers, it is likely that these fee tiers may not totally be accurate.

Proposal 

In the analysis above, we suppose that the reason why Uniswap has lost market share to Aerodrome over the last 4 months is Aerodrome’s lower fee tier on its ETH-USDC pool. This pool has attracted more retail flow as Uniswap’s flows have similar. The increase in retail flow and lower fees have in turn attracted significant non-retail flow.  

Since Aerodrome is a Uniswap v3 fork, we see this analysis as good evidence of the viability of a lower fee pool for ETH-USDC on Base and suggest it as evidence to governance that this proposal has merit.

Cons: 

One benefit of Uniswap v3 is the incentive to collect liquidity into one pool, creating network effects. We posted a tweet about it here

However, we believe that liquidity providers will respond quickly to updates of the fee. This will overcome the effects from liquidity fragmentation.

Proposal

Just like the 1 bp fee tier originally proposed 3 years ago by Getty Hill, we propose to additionally add a 2, 3, 4 bps fee tier to Uniswap v3 on Base. 

You may question why we are proposing the creation of three new fee tiers when our analysis only focused on 4 bps. There are two reasons for this. For one, Aerodrome is able to adjust fees automatically on Base. We anticipate they may respond by lowering fees below 4 bps and want Uniswap Protocol to allow LPs to move without governance intervention if this happens. 

Second, we believe this analysis may be a single case study into a larger finding that the required fee for LPs on L2s may be lower than 5 bps. While Aerodrome highlights the success of a 4 bp fee tier, it’s unclear whether that’s the right market rate. It may be lower. 

If you are interested in more content like this, feel free to follow us at @whetstonedotcc on Twitter or subscribe to this blog. If you REALLY like this approach, then also delegate your UNI to us at whetstoneresearch.eth

I first want to thank you for taking a look. This Friday (June 21st) I hope to release the first iteration of our newsletter “the Sharpening Block” - the monthly Whetstone newsletter. It will address the future of onchain and other interesting threads in crypto.

Whetstone is currently a team of one. For a little introduction, my name is Austin Adams - I currently advise Uniswap Labs and another soon-to-be-named firm on mechanism design and protocols research. Previously, I worked full-time at Uniswap Labs as a researcher, and before that at the Federal Reserve in non-US financial markets research. 

Almost all my academic and professional background is on the mechanics of exchanges - starting with traditional financial exchanges to, now, crypto exchanges. When I was working in traditional finance, I consistently wished that I was around for the early electronification of financial markets with the introduction of ECNs and central limit order books (CLOBs) in the early 2000s. I felt like that was the last major change in financial exchange structures. The most recent change is the internalization of retail trades - popularized by Robinhood - which has had questionable benefits for market participants (a debate that we will save for another day).

Since these early market structure changes, prices for retail traders have not notably improved, especially for small-cap assets. This challenge is one of the reasons I am so fond of AMMs. Liquidity provision for small-cap assets is notoriously difficult and incredibly important for 99% of assets. AMMs provide the first live solution for this small-cap liquidity provision - as AMMs specialize in creating liquid markets from nothing.

One of the reasons why AMMs are so good at providing liquidity is because they de-sync the liquidity provision from the pricing of that liquidity. In other words, one set of users provides the liquidity and another prices it. In CLOB-based markets, market participants both provide the liquidity and the pricing. Very few market participants are able to do both of those things, which has led to an extreme concentration of market power in a few high-frequency market-making firms.

The benefit of this de-synced model is that many market participants (retail, funds, etc.) already hold assets and desire exposure to that asset. Their cost of capital for providing this liquidity is significantly cheaper than a market-making firm, which must both borrow that capital with leverage and pay its employees to rid themselves of exposure to that asset’s risk (which is a desirable property for many). 

However, these market participants (retail, funds, etc.) cannot price their liquidity at high-frequency and thus are locked out of the system. With AMMs, these users could, unlocking savings through lower capital costs that pass through to retail traders. Indeed, research has theorized that AMMs could save retail traders $10b a year in trading costs. 

Another one of crypto’s super powers is composability, which is the ability for different parts of the ecosystem to easily interact with each other (colloquially referred to as “money legos”). Because systems in crypto are designed with composability in mind, mechanism designers need to think deeply not only about their own design, but about how their system fits within the broader ecosystem. This is something that Whetstone Research intends to focus on. 

Here are a few of the many questions we want to explore.

1. AMMs are the king of low liquidity assets. What improvements can we make to AMMs to become more competitive with high-liquidity assets?

2. Exchanges underpin capital transformation onchain between risk and flight to safety, which is key to the functioning of lending protocols. How can onchain exchanges work more closely with lending protocols to create a mutually beneficial ecosystem?

3. Increasing throughput to chains has led to a growth in probabilistic MEV, leading to widespread user experience issues for chains like Solana and Base. How can chains combat probabilistic MEV to continue to lower costs for their users?

4. DAOs are starting to make significant revenues. For example, MakerDAO is ontrack to make $327m annualized. What is the future of DAOs and how will they continue to scale with this newfound revenue?

If you are building, working, or thinking about these types of questions, feel free to reach out! We are looking for design partners, collaborators, investments, and anyone else interested in these topics.

For more information, see our website.