January 29th, 2026 – New York, United States
The onchain launch protocol now powers the majority of new DEX pools on Base, with over $1.5B in value created and $1B+ in trading volume in just nine months
Doppler, the default launch protocol for teams raising capital onchain, today announced a $9 million seed round led by Pantera Capital, with participation from Variant, Figment Capital, and Coinbase Ventures. The funding comes as Doppler has rapidly emerged as the core market infrastructure for new onchain assets, powering the majority of token launches and DEX pools on Base.
Since launching nine months ago, Doppler has become the default path to market for new onchain assets. Over 90% of new DEX pools on Base now launch via Doppler, and its infrastructure supports tokens created by leading applications including Zora, Base App, Paragraph, FxHash, and more. Today, more than 40,000 assets are created daily using Doppler, representing over $1.5 billion in value and more than $1 billion in cumulative trading volume.
Launching a token today is closer to running an IPO than deploying a website – except there are no banks, no underwriters, and no established playbook. Teams often spend months preparing launches, only to see snipers extract value, liquidity fail to materialize, and charts collapse within days. When 80–90% of tokens seek similar outcomes, yet each team continues to roll its own launch infrastructure, something is fundamentally broken.
“Capital formation has not fundamentally changed in over a century, despite how broken the IPO process has become,” said Austin Adams, creator of the Doppler Protocol and founder of Whetstone Research. “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. In this new reality, the mechanism determines the outcome. That’s why we invented Doppler.”
Doppler compresses months of infrastructure work – token deployment, vesting, liquidity bootstrapping, governance, and fee routing – into a single, unified interface. At the core of the protocol are price discovery auctions designed to protect launches from snipers while generating protocol-owned liquidity from day one. This allows teams to focus on building applications and communities, rather than reinventing fragile and complex launch mechanics.
With customizable auctions for nearly any asset type, Doppler’s infrastructure supports tokenized equities, commodities, TGEs, content, art, creators, and ideas. Assets launched via Doppler are immediately tradeable across any interface supporting the underlying DEX, ensuring maximum distribution from day one.
The results have been significant. Since launch, more than six million pools have been deployed through Doppler, representing 93% of Uniswap v4 pools on Base and 91% across all supported networks. In total, this activity represents over 40,000 assets launched daily, with more than $1.5 billion in value created and over $1 billion in trading volume.
The $9 million seed round will enable Doppler to expand into self-serve markets, support larger token generation events, and deepen integrations across the onchain ecosystem. The team includes engineers with backgrounds at Uniswap, Primitive Finance, and Aztec, bringing experience building AMMs and market infrastructure at scale.
Already the default launch infrastructure for coins on Base, Doppler’s broader mission is to become the default infrastructure for entirely new asset classes that could not have existed before. Doppler helps teams build apps, not auctions – and is redefining how capital formation works onchain.
About Whetstone Research
Whetstone Research is building the future of onchain markets. Their first product is Doppler, a hyper-efficient price discovery and liquidity bootstrapping Protocol for projects that are meant to last. Their second product is Pure Markets, a launchpad for serious projects and trading terminal.
Contact
Bridgett Frey
[email protected]
