Doppler: A New Way to Launch Tokens with Austin Adams

Episode Transcript:

David:
[0:04] Austin adams from doppler uh does everyone need a token

Austin Adams:
[0:08] I think everyone should launch at least one token in their lifetime i.

David:
[0:11] Think crypto people are kind of looking for justification as to why we need more tokens not less i think

Austin Adams:
[0:16] 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 and we need to make it easier to price these things we're creating value much faster than we can price and so it's hard for

Austin Adams:
[0:39] people to get the value for the things that they deserve there's.

David:
[0:42] A lot of meme coin push back or valueless coin push back i think from people because people are very wary about like the conduits for for grift in the space which i totally understand but also if you just look at the arc of crypto neutrally, you had Bitcoin and it was this invention that made the first internet asset. And then what did we do with that? We made 10,000 more blockchains. And then we realized you don't really need that many blockchains. Maybe you should just use Bitcoin. But then we made Ethereum. And instead of making more blockchains, we created the ERC20 token. And so, you know, what was the original token launchpad? It was actually Ethereum and the ERC20 token and the ICO meta and all of that and then we made NFTs and then like true like launch pads came with pump fun and now we have you know 10,000 tokens being made a second and so like I understand that there's like meme coin vapid token pushback but you also I think 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

Austin Adams:
[1:44] Yeah I think like I agree definitely agree with that I understand sort of people's pushback on meme coins i think that they some 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.

Austin Adams:
[2:11] 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 sort of like put shoe hoarding them into other things and i think some will be extremely lindy they'll be so about they'll be very valuable they'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 just see what people think it's worth and buying selling it and i think over time the way that we can join the value of something to the asset sort of will change over time but i think it's like only moving towards everything is going to be priced and that's like sort of like the end goal should be for everything it'll be content it'll be you know companies it'll be you know like maybe even like data and things that are valueless like meme coins as well it sort of 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's fine.

David:
[3:28] Yeah you use the word conjoining if 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 in real world assets it's like all right we use the meat space legal system to conjoin value between something in the real world to a token and then there's also like defy apps and 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 where 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 to this meme coin, we unlock something. That is not what I understand what you are working on. You are working on something

David:
[4:17] 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 PumpFun. And then like maybe Doppler is maybe the next step to push that frontier a little bit further, make it a little bit more sophisticated?

Austin Adams:
[4:34] Let's hope, I would say. We're all hoping. Yeah, so I said, like, we work on, I am the CEO of Whetstone Research. We're sort of just, like, building products, building protocols that we think push the on-chain future forward. Our first protocol is called doppler it's uh we call it a liquidity bootstrapping protocol but what it's designed to do is uh generate tokens of value so there's a lot of value on the internet there's a lot of value in 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 it has creator fees, if it's just like nothing, if it's just like a regular like pump fund style token, you can pick between the prices that you want to set it at. You can pick the bonding curve style. You can pick all of these things.

Austin Adams:
[5:30] 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 MoneyLego-esque, trying to let creators and let people who want to

Austin Adams:
[5:53] 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 on like white glove service where they want to pick these pieces. They want our help sort of like picking the protocol out and picking sort of like the technology and the pricing mechanism 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 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.

Austin Adams:
[6:30] You know pushing the start of the price discovery down a lot and we have other people like ohara who is doing ai tokens ai app tokens and they sort of like we're playing with their model and they have dow's and we sort of have like a lot of other people who are building on top of this and we're, letting them pick from a menu of things messing with their market 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 feel everything the contracts to sort of the application or the contracts and the markets are sort of what we deal with we give you an sdk we give you all the contracts and on the other side applications can just call our contracts. They can sort of like build these very customized models and they don't have to think about all those things. They just think about like the app and the way their users interact with their own app. And I think 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 launch pad. It's too hard. It's not like Lindy and we need to make it so that like there's the benefit of crypto is like everyone has money Legos. We want to build the seventh Lego or whatever. You know, everyone always says there's like six smart contracts that matter.

Austin Adams:
[7:54] We're trying to make sure the seventh one is customizable and everyone can use it.

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David:
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David:
[9:48] Okay, so Whetstone 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 finds what sticks but you're you're not a token launch pad like pump fun you are a build a launch pad workshop or how would how would you explain like i'm five this

Austin Adams:
[10:15] I would say we're like a launch pad protocol so you can build your own launch pad on top of it but at the same time like you we have our own interface called pure markets where we just sort of test stuff out and try things and so but we have other people who are building on top of it as well so like they're building you can build these customized launcher pads 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 with dows attached to them so every single token launched on pure has a dow it has token voting it has a treasury but some other people are building tokens that have no doubts or building creator coins we have other people who are building you know really small priced uh like value they're sort of like application coins where it's like tied to an application so like on o'hara every single time you build a launch a token and you make an app it has like a you know 10 of the token supply invests over 12 months to these creators who are vibe coding apps and if your vibe your app takes off you sort of have like a base of capital to work off of and so i would say that like yeah there is.

Austin Adams:
[11:27] The incentives in this market are like kind of weird and every single app is very different and we can't treat them all the same so i say that pump was like you know it's very good for meme coins i think the pump team does a really great job and like i think that they are clearly innovating on something and i think that they have made missteps along the way but it's like very clearly like a 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.

David:
[11:54] Right. So in the pump wars, PumpFun came and they were the copy and paste factory for the SP1. The SP1 is like the ERC20 token for Solana, right? And so they just made the first ever token launchpad.

David:
[12:08] LaunchLab, which is the Radium competitor to PumpFun, made LaunchLab. And it's not a launchpad, it's a launchpad launchpad. And so it lets you build your own launch pad so you can be the copy and paster of the solana sp1 token contract and then you can go compete with pump fun and so now launch lab has launch lab helps you launch launch pads to do the sp1 the problem with the sp1 is that it's very uncustomizable in the solana lab it's very great for copy and pasting because it just operates on the same token contract it's a simpleton token contract there's not a lot of customizability you can talk to martin from Mountain Protocol who tried to like iterate this one small little feature that was like kind of like rebasing for their SP1 token, their 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 just hosed.

David:
[13:07] And on the Ethereum side of things, the ERC20 token, incredibly customizable, incredibly extensible, extensible, perhaps even to a fault because it chooses up a bunch of bytecode and data and inflates our nose, but whatever. 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?

Austin Adams:
[13:48] Yeah, I'd 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 OpenZeppelin is like very reused. These are things that are like, you know, in thousands and hundreds of thousands of ERC20s at this point, but they're not in all ERC20s, right? They're not in all of them. And another piece that we reuse a lot is our liquidity bootstrapping model. So we deploy like a cool for you, we initialize all, or I guess the protocol deploys it for you and initializes all of it.

David:
[14:18] Is that a balancer pool?

Austin Adams:
[14:19] No, it's a Uniswap pool. So we built a sort of like specialized Uniswap pool designed exactly for liquidity bootstrapping. 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 how can we take all of the thoughts away from all our integrators and make it just a contract call. So right now when someone uses our contracts, they just 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 brand just gets to turn off.

Austin Adams:
[15:02] Uh 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 the internet sort of showed that like you just give everyone packages that do like extremely complicated things and like no one knows how like you know, TensorFlow or PyTorch works, but like they're generating apps, they're generating like really cool images all the time based off of them. And so we need to make like packages that people use. They don't have to think about them, they just import them and use them. And so we're trying to do that for tokens. It's essentially the same thing. And yeah, I mean, like people reuse, we sort of like supply a lot of different things, but I would say like the most popular things are like the creator style, like social content tokens that like feed fees back to like creators and protocols and then also like dow tokens where you create a dow for something and it exists long term for these users and it does like large-scale capital bootstrapping and like community the community owns a treasury the community gets to 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 having like very unique to crypto and very unique ethereum where like we have this sort of like large.

Austin Adams:
[16:22] You know, different types of tokens that like anyone can use. And they're very different. But like at the end of the day, like it's like functionally the same code. It's like very well-trusted, very parameterizable code that anyone can pick from.

David:
[16:35] There's two problems out there that I think are worth tackling,

David:
[16:38] 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. Haha, that's hilarious. We're making, it's during the AI model, the AI agent meta. But then the thing pumped to like $600 million because the founder, Shaw, and a bunch of other people decided that like, you know, there was actually enough there to go work on this project. And so they actually decided to, you know, start as a meme coin but they backed it into a startup they were like oh let's turn a startup out of this which the reason why they did that was because the meme coin went to 600 million dollars or a billion dollars at the point it only really works when the token goes up and they're all getting wealthy but when the token goes down they realize that they are all working on this fucking meme coin and they didn't take team shares and they don't have any vesting equity and they don't have any long-term incentives and so when the token price went down the whole project imploded because they didn't think about long-term incentives. They didn't balance the books. They didn't have enough supply for the team to be incentivized. And so like one set of software tools I think would be good is people who want to launch a meme coin.

David:
[18:01] Also have team shares at the same time how do you fix this problem

Austin Adams:
[18:06] 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 they're very sophisticated they have like you know you know teams they have people who are working on them and they just like can't really do anything long term like it just sort of hits a point where like exactly what you said like there's like they need some type of like corporate governance and so every single token we launch on our interface has a dow exactly for this purpose where it's like if people if it takes off to a certain point you can become something like a regular 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 the people think they are and we need to let them sort of transition from being pure meme coins to like being meme coins plus and so that's sort of what we think of these 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 invested or in tokens inside the DAO control by the DAO treasury.

Austin Adams:
[19:09] 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 that's what I think was really powerful about meme coins is we had this permissionless capital formation that grew from meme people wanting to, they believe in the AI-16Z vision. They're like, this thing's cool. I want to get into this. I believe in AI. I want to take part in it.

Austin Adams:
[19:42] And they just couldn't do it. There's just no corporate way to do that. And so we think a lot about how do we let people, they don't have to be DAOs. Who cares? You don't have to. Don't worry about the DAO.

David:
[19:53] Right. A DAO and a team. Yeah, exactly.

Austin Adams:
[19:55] Exactly. Like, just like if it does, if you don't care about the Dow, just don't use it. Like, who cares? It's just like a smart contract that sits there that no one has to worry about. No, I think about and it's just a meme point 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 can these decisions are delayed and there's time for the market to sort of settle around these things.

David:
[20:16] 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 LegalZoom, it'll ask you a series of questions of like, do you want this property in your LLC? Like, what about this? Would you like to add this to the contract? And it's the same thing. It's like the smart contract. Would you like to add some sort of like rules about team corporate governance investing and, you know, whatever you would might need to like start a token in a way that you would want to start it? It's the same thing. So you're like LegalZoom for token deployments. Yeah.

Austin Adams:
[20:49] 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, uh, I it's like we have this 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 what 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 like no one's really it's just different and people are trying new things and it's like that's something that i think every meme coin needs it needs to like be able to turn to meme coin plus because that's what people expect out of them once they hit a certain value like evaluation

Austin Adams:
[21:38] they expect a team to do things okay.

David:
[21:40] 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 percent of the supply in the first block and now that the whole like purpose behind that meme coin is gone so how do you solve the sniper problem yeah so

Austin Adams:
[22:07] I i like i was really on friend tech really early and it was like very obvious these static like 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 frintech 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 frintech's bonding curve model.

Austin Adams:
[22:37] And it was pretty clear to me pretty early on in Pump that this was going to be very problematic. And it was going to get more and more problematic as the perceived value of these new token launches went up. 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 bond. 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 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 tree 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 same they don't the market structure is exactly the same uh and i wrote a white paper about this like a year ago and i theorized like this exact problem was like this is like exactly what's going to happen like we've seen this on believe where every single token launch gets absolutely sniped because the perceived value so high.

Austin Adams:
[23:50] 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 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 like internet capital markets. I just think it's like on-chain

Austin Adams:
[24:18] capital formation. and i think like it's.

David:
[24:21] 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 works like i

Austin Adams:
[24:30] Think if we need that we need the 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 needs this dynamic model and i think like sort of we built it for that so.

David:
[24:52] 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

Austin Adams:
[25:07] Yeah so we stream liquidity in over time so we put like significantly less of the liquidity on the curve and during sort of execution we adjust much faster and so you don't sell 100 of the token immediately you sell maybe like one or two percent of the token and if people immediately race and buy that a lot you just end the sale right if you hit a certain amount of proceeds you just end the sale immediately and you use that sort of like bond liquidity again so you say like great i wanted to raise a million dollars say i raised a million dollars selling one percent 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 would only be selling very little and the bonding curve sort of works by locking people in so you can still sell but it's not it's not risk-free anymore the sort of system moves against you so if you it's where 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, 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.

David:
[26:27] It's also reactive over time. So time is a factor, is a variable that's known to the protocol. And so if the price is not changing over time, you accelerate the rate of the price changing. And so you do find the market clearing price quickly, sufficiently quick. It's not like a very slow static change over a long period of time, right?

Austin Adams:
[26:47] 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. They did, and it worked very well for them.

David:
[26:57] It worked very well.

Austin Adams:
[26:58] 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 going to try a bunch of stuff and see which one works.

David:
[27:13] 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.

Austin Adams:
[27:39] I would say that like who we're optimizing for is the person who's best at picking the price of the asset.

Speaker2:
[27:45] So if you think the price is too low, buy it. If you think the price is too high,

Austin Adams:
[27:49] Sell it.

Speaker2:
[27:49] And if you're wrong, you lose money.

Austin Adams:
[27:51] And that's sort of how it should be.

David:
[27:53] If you're impatient, you also lose money, right?

Austin Adams:
[27:56] Yeah, I guess you'd have to sell it back, and then you'd sort of lose money. But yeah, we're trying to say that 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 incentivize the person who's the fastest. We want to incentivize

Austin Adams:
[28:15] the person who's the best at pricing things.

David:
[28:17] Can I give you a bear case for what's going on? What I think is 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 DGens are like, I like that meme. It's on pump fun. 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?

Austin Adams:
[28:44] 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 protocol is trying to say, like, I am, you're going to put tokens in my protocol, I'm going to get as much humanly out for you. And I would say that, like, it's not, it's a different user persona than pump users. And I think, like, people are going to go, I think, like, these people who speculate, I don't think they really care about where they're speculating. They just want to, you know, speculate on the best things. They want to know if it's a company, if it's a meme, if it's anything. Like, you just sort of give them the best opportunities, and they'll go there. And I think Pump has given people the best opportunities. It's very clearly done that. And so I would say that, like, we're not really trying to compete with Pump. I think they're very good at their game, and I don't really want to compete with them. I want to compete with centralized exchanges, and I want to compete with market makers and underwriters. That's the sort of person I'm trying to compete with, and that's a different game, and we're trying to compete for issuers who want to issue assets, and I want to get those, if you want to issue on Pum, go do it. If you think it's going to give you more money, do it. I don't really care, but I think it's not going to for large scale users who want to launch a token over.

Speaker2:
[30:04] A hundred thousand dollars in expected value

David:
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David:
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David:
[31:56] Audited by ZK Security, the Self app is live on iOS and Play Store. Visit self.xyz and follow Self Protocol on X. I think like one bull case, the maximum bull case for... Doppler, Whetstone, Doppler?

Speaker2:
[32:10] Either one.

Austin Adams:
[32:11] So it's a little confusing.

David:
[32:13] Doppler's the product. Whetstone is the lab. Okay. Is a public markets IPO on chain where there is not liquidity anywhere else. You're not putting like coin stock on chain. You're going public with a company that their last round was $50 billion. Dollars 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 and so the maximum bull case there's a hypothesizing here is that some company, BlockWorks. BlockWorks goes public at, I don't know what.

Austin Adams:
[33:08] Hit my line, Mike.

David:
[33:09] Let's do it. Billion dollars. Billion dollars. Congrats, Mike and Yeno. 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

Austin Adams:
[33:32] Yeah i would say that like you know public markets are actually like very inefficient and sort of ipo 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 they're 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 there are like structurally incentivized to not give you the best price.

David:
[34:16] And so seems like a racket.

Austin Adams:
[34:18] Yeah. So there's like, you know, you can look at the math is since 1980 or something, 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.

Austin Adams:
[34:36] 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. 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 sent to dexes like dex first listings that sort of changed i think the game a lot i were like the structural incentives for uh 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 i think a lot of i i actually think that the most interesting person for the protocol is people who couldn't ipo or couldn't get liquidity or are building new assets that like are ever going to be supported by market maker or.

Austin Adams:
[35:53] 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 gonna launch a 10 million dollar token they're like i don't care i'm gonna go spend you know another

Austin Adams:
[36:26] two weeks on this half trillion dollar one and that's.

David:
[36:30] Like right and max extract on that

Austin Adams:
[36:31] Yeah that's sort of i think you know the your words i guess i'll let you say that i 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 u.s 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.

David:
[37:06] Interesting yeah i was asking that question about like the theoretical question about if BlockWorks were to IPO using Doppler because it's kind of like a 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.

Austin Adams:
[37:21] 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 gatekept 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.

David:
[37:48] 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,

Austin Adams:
[38:05] What would you go do? That's a good question. I think something I've really confused by, I think every single like interface that has distribution should have a token launcher at this point. Like it's 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.

David:
[38:30] Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Yeah, tell me. If I own my users, so the readers of banklist.com.

Austin Adams:
[38:36] Give them a token launcher right now.

David:
[38:39] In, like, an article?

Austin Adams:
[38:40] Why not?

Speaker2:
[38:41] I don't know.

David:
[38:41] In line? It's like, here's a token that goes with this article.

Speaker2:
[38:45] Like, how about it?

Austin Adams:
[38:46] 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 unit socks part two on Dovler. 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.

David:
[39:20] You'd do a tokenized fashion collab with some sort of like influencer or distribution. You need distribution somehow.

Austin Adams:
[39:28] I'm wearing my kid's super stuff right now. So I think that...

David:
[39:30] Oh, dude, I missed my draw.

Austin Adams:
[39:32] They're good. I missed the draw. They're good. and they you know it's i'll hit i'll hit them up for it and we'll see if we can get some kid super unisauce collab because i think like that's like this was it was.

David:
[39:43] It you that pilled mike epilito 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 And he's been going down that rabbit hole. Was that you?

Austin Adams:
[40:05] I hope so. He has said he I did two podcasts with him, one about that. And I was like, very like, you know, every single thing is going to be content or every single thing is going to become a market. So you can price it in real time like a prediction market. And so I do think I do think I impacted him. I think Jacob at Zora also did a lot of working on it. I think us two did very much destroy that man's brain, unfortunately, on with returns of content coins. But I think, you know, I think he would know. I think you would know as well, right? Like, 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. 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.

David:
[41:22] I'm just like thinking like Bankless, we put out like four bits of content every single day so like three newsletter bits the daily brief was just summary and then a podcast right and so you know if we put a token on every single one of those things most of them are going to be zero worth tokens but then i'm then i go think of like when we had like 5 000 people in a live stream between eric voorhees and sam bankman 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 permission list of Aave and email. And then there was this one moment where Eric Voorhees asked this very precise question. I think it was the Aave 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 2000 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 there would be life in that chart at least during the era of that live stream i think so

Austin Adams:
[42:46] As well and i 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 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 be very valuable especially like say you had an ad or something on the lifetime stream of that moment and everyone was looking at it and like every single time they looked at it it was just a little bit more money that went into that token like and they're so lindy and they expect they live for so long and content is like a lot of content is ephemeral but a lot of it's not and so those things like you know there's blog posts i read that are like 10 15 years old now that like maybe they should get some ad value maybe they should have sort of like 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 a value list 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 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

Austin Adams:
[44:05] and i think markets are very very good at that what was that one.

David:
[44:07] Painter or maybe composer who like was not famous during while they were alive but then after they died they kind of blew

Austin Adams:
[44:15] Up? I think a lot of them did that. Van Gogh, I think, was the very famous one.

David:
[44:19] Van Gogh? Was Van Gogh like that?

Austin Adams:
[44:21] Yeah, he like very notoriously like exploded. And like, yeah, like no one cared about his stuff and it exploded afterwards and like, you know.

David:
[44:29] And imagine if like the incentive to like Van Gogh tokenized his paintings, right? Like meme coined his paintings. This is hilarious.

Austin Adams:
[44:38] It's bullish. That's also bullish. I love that idea.

David:
[44:40] 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 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 is really fire and all the world knows about it. And this one person CTO the hell out of the token. I think that would be hilarious.

Austin Adams:
[45:08] I think that's what happened. Probably. Right. I assume somebody bought up, you know, some Van Gogh enjoyer bought a bunch of Van Gogh and they said this shit's fire. Like, let's put it all out. And I think that that's like that's probably actually like they just 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 then like, I think that'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 they're very important. And so i think like a lot of people think about these things like they don't think about like you shared that content to your friends and you know maybe like started this like my reality loop and you captured none of it and the platform captured all of it 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 10 cent little things on zora and i it's great i have a great time. And I think it's like, if you think about it like that, where it's like, you know, just like a little bit of like a click or something like that, like it's very different than buying like a thousand, hundreds of thousands of dollars of these coins and losing all of it.

David:
[46:31] 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 mimetic, mimetically associated. Like you said something where like the advertising revenue on a piece of content goes into buying back the token. Like if I go click on a website, that click is worth two cents. That's 50% fee split between like the creator and then also the token holders, 50 cents goes to burn. And then all of a sudden you can buy that token as a function of the traffic on that website if you think you need to CTO some like dusty old blog that you think is going to blow up in a hot 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 coupling of the token to real value capture.

Austin Adams:
[47:15] I think that's like what we think about all the time is like, how do you build something that has, Like I say that like meme coins inherently have no value. I wouldn't say they inherently. I think a lot of them actually do have value, but like that's like the thing people say is like, these are valueless tokens. It's like, okay, we know we had valueless tokens. 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 then if you don't want to, don't buy it. I don't care. That's fine. But 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. 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.

Austin Adams:
[48:07] It's just like it's up to you to build them and build them in a way such that it's safe for all users.

David:
[48:11] Valuable tokens in contrast to value list tokens is, I think, one of the main reasons why many of us are here in crypto. And so maybe the first arc of crypto is learning to make tokens. Now I would say that we have sufficiently learned to make tokens. Like, I think you need to polish off some of the tools that you're building at Doppler, and then we're 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 valuable tokens? And I think the SEC getting unblocked from us is very helpful in that regard. And just a few more mechanisms and tools in our tool belts, and we can start to make internet capital markets with valuable tokens, which, like I said, is I think one of the reasons why we are all here.

Austin Adams:
[48:55] 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 you believe in and make money off of it. Like that's like that's the dream, I would say.

David:
[49:09] That's the whole thing. Awesome. Really great to bring you on.

David:
[49:12] Really great to meet you, my man.

Austin Adams:
[49:13] Appreciate it. It was a great chat with you as well.

David:
[49:15] 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?

Austin Adams:
[49:24] 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 Austin Adams 10. And we're like, whetstone.cc is our like company Twitter where we like tweet about all of our products. and so you can sort of find us there.

David:
[49:50] Cool. Awesome. Thanks for coming on, my man. Of course. Bankless Nation, you guys know the deal. Crypto is risky. You can lose what you put in, but hopefully what you put in is something of value. We are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we are glad you are with us on the Bankless journey.

Austin Adams:
[50:02] Thanks a lot.

Music:
[50:14] Music