Written by: Cooper Kunz & Austin Adams

Originally published to Austin’s twitter

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Doppler is an Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) based permissionless liquidity bootstrapping Protocol. Doppler’s smart contracts implement an initial auction and, when a token reaches its specified “graduation price”, the token and its initial liquidity automatically gets migrated to popular decentralized exchanges (DEXs) like Uniswap v2, providing an end to end lifecycle for those wishing to create tokens that can be used throughout the Ethereum DeFi economy.

Doppler is agnostic to what types of assets are created using its smart contracts. However, one emerging asset class we are particularly excited about at Whetstone Research is the rising idea of “Application tokens” (1) (2), also known as appcoins or application-specific coins.

Historically protocols have issued tokens in order to provide economic security to their networks. The Bitcoin blockchain issues new tokens to its miners. Ethereum/Solana issue new tokens to its validators. However, we are entering a new era where applications can issue tokens with other aims and ambitions beyond providing economic security (since applications don’t have a similar concept) or simply being memes with no inherent value. Whether a developer’s ambitions are to provide alignment between users and application developers, or community engagement, such as customer acquisition, retention, or reputation signaling, or revenue generation — appcoins on Doppler are the easiest way for these developers to achieve their goals.

Belief in the appcoin thesis is fueled by recent developments in artificial intelligence. Soon, there will be a proliferation of apps due to the ability to generate high quality code on demand, which will result in more teams fighting for distribution and ways to hook their first set of loyal users. Appcoins can, and will, push the bounds of what is possible today, helping these teams differentiate in novel ways. As part of this rapid tokenization, the application flywheel will compress, from generation, onboarding, and monetization, requiring tighter coordination between every step of the way.

Unfortunately, like many, we agree that tokens have historically been poorly aligned between their community, investors, team, and the underlying application, due to various factors including lack of regulatory clarity and immature onchain mechanisms. But those times are rapidly changing… and we think that appcoins should be here to stay.