Doppler

Doppler is the first product by Whetstone Research, a firm building frameworks, products, and infrastructure for an Internet where all users can build, create, and trade any type of value. Think Vercel for onchain infrastructure.

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.