At Variant, we believe that all of the world’s value will one day be tokenized and live onchain. This was the driving thesis behind our investment in Uniswap nearly five years ago. That same conviction holds today and is a driving factor in our pre-seed investment in Whetstone. 

Whetstone is building new mechanisms for the future of onchain markets. The team’s first product is Doppler: a protocol that expands the design space for issuing tokens and bootstrapping liquidity. Doppler is a Swiss Army knife for launching new assets, giving issuers simple tools to maximize capital efficiency, real community participation, trust, and transparency.

It’s almost surprising that, in 2025, improving asset issuance with thoughtful mechanism design is still low-hanging fruit. We believe that in hindsight, these optimizations will be an obvious and critical step in tokenizing all of the world’s value. 

The State of Token Issuance Today

Over the past year, the number of weekly token launches has 20x’ed (from 20k to 400k). That’s over 20 million tokens created annually. Yet we believe this is still the early innings and that the number of new assets launched will continue to grow exponentially as more onchain projects start token-first. 

The popularity of token launches has shed light on a number of problems with the current infrastructure for issuance.

Value Leakage

First, most token launchers leak value to extractive third parties (searchers, trading bots, and even malicious insiders). Existing issuance mechanisms are structured such that it’s easy for bots to snipe large amounts of a token’s supply right as they are created, crowding out authentic community participation. The result of this concentration among mercenary actors is a “pump and dump” effect, wherein sniper bots dump on retail investors – often leading to a user base or community that gets off on the wrong foot. 

Restricted Composability

Second, issuance platforms today restrict composability. On many token issuance platforms, tokens are traded on closed backends until they “graduate” (by achieving a certain price) to liquidity pools created on larger DEXs (Raydium on Solana, Uniswap on Ethereum). As a result, other ecosystem developers can’t as easily take advantage of the liquidity on the platforms and are forced to rely on third-party dependencies (e.g. external price oracles) if they want to create projects around the issuance activity. The combination unnecessarily limits the design space for both building onchain applications and extending token utility. 

Lack of Trust

Finally, existing token launchers do not have a mechanism to align issuers and communities. In startup markets, vesting mechanisms are tried and true for a reason: they help ensure that founders remain committed to the long-term buildout of a project. It’s important for both founder incentives and community confidence. In the crypto market, we’re seeing projects choose to launch tokens earlier and earlier in their lifecycles. Doing so helps give users the opportunity to put skin in the game and contribute to the development of the project. But without vesting, the incentive for issuers to stay committed and aligned with community members is lacking and, just as we saw in the ICO era, the result is a lack of serious, long-term projects getting built.

Doppler offers solutions for each of these problems while giving token deployers far more customization than any other issuance platform in the market today.

How Doppler Works

Doppler’s north star is to make issuance more efficient and expressive. It combats snipers, enables permissionless composability, and aligns incentives– all coupled with a toolbox of new customizations and toys for token deployers. 

Protections Against Sniper Bots 

Today, many bots are programmed to buy as much of a token’s supply as possible below certain price levels. The Doppler protocol counteracts this behavior by changing the bonding curve such that  a smaller portion of the supply is sold at lower prices, while larger and larger increments are sold as the price increases. The result is that tokens issued on Doppler are less economically attractive for bots to snipe – the bots can’t buy as much of the token supply simply by being first. Higher price levels also require a greater amount of token supply turnover to move the price, thereby mitigating the ability of bots to dump tokens and the price impact of a sale. It’s a major win for users.  

Expanded Composability 

That Doppler’s code is open source and composable removes the need for many of the third-party dependencies that developers may normally have to use when building on other issuance platforms. For example, imagine a prediction market that allows users to bet on whether they think a given token will hit the bonding curve within a certain time frame. With issuance platforms today, developers would need to use a third-party oracle to verify whether the token hits the curve (because the issuance platforms have closed-source code). There’s a lag between the time the event occurs and when the market actually resolves, creating value leakage in the form of bots arbitraging the difference. Contrast that to Doppler, where Doppler is the oracle: the instant the token bonds, the market resolves. This reduces value leakage.

Aligned Incentives

Token deployers on Doppler can set programmable, publicly auditable vesting schedules. To our knowledge, this is a first for issuance protocols. As more and more projects choose to launch a token earlier in their lifecycles, vesting can help give supporters confidence that the founders are aligned with the long-term success of the project; it’s a critical step for native tokenization to mature and grow as a path for capital formation. 

Additional Functionality

Beyond these benefits, Doppler offers an array of new tools for token deployers, including the ability to customize price curves, supply distributions, liquidity pairs and more. 

Overall, this is a big deal. Nearly every part of the asset lifecycle is downstream of issuance. Getting it right should dramatically improve the way assets are discovered, traded, and utilized onchain.

Why This Team

Whetstone was founded by Austin Adams. He’s one of the few people in the world who has extensive, direct experience with both onchain and traditional financial market structures. Prior to Whetstone, Austin was a core protocol researcher at Uniswap Labs. He helped design Uniswap v4 – the frontier of onchain exchange infrastructure. Before Uniswap, Austin worked as a researcher at the Federal Reserve with a focus on global capital markets. In fact, the inefficiencies he saw in traditional cross-border FX market infrastructure were what first led him to crypto.

We’ve gotten to know Austin deeply over the past few years – first in his role at Uniswap, then as a mechanism advisor for Variant. Observing him both work on designing new protocols and engage with our portfolio companies enabled us to see first-hand how bleeding edge mechanism design comes as almost second nature for Austin. When Austin told us he was starting a company, backing him felt like a no-brainer. 

He’s also recruited a strong team at Whetstone. Clement Lakhal and Matt Czernik join him from Primitive Finance, where they had helped build secure DeFi protocols. Coupled with Austin, we believe this team is extremely capable of building the next generation of sophisticated financial infrastructure. 

Doppler is live today on Unichain, and the first token launcher with a Doppler integration is live at Pure Markets. And if you’re an interface interested in integrating Doppler, reach out to the team here.