A fairer way to start? A detailed explanation of Pure, the first Memecoin launch platform in the Unichain ecosystem

Author: Nian Qing, ChainCatcher

In February of this year, with the exposure of LIBRA and the Cabal, the era of Pump.fun and Memecoin officially came to an end.

Memecoin started out as a fun and relatively pure PvP game, but with the "industrialization" of coining, Memecoin has evolved into a predatory game dominated by an internal "cabal". At first, the occasional wealth effect can temporarily obscure the manipulation methods of the bookmakers, but the players become more greedy, the retail investors are repeatedly cut, and the liquidity eventually dries up, and no one wants to participate in such a game anymore.

Moreover, except for the cabal. At present, many token issuance platforms (including Pump.fun) are facing serious fairness issues, such as the existence of a large number of sniper bots and fake trading volume bots, tokens are snapped up at low prices to drive up prices, fake market trends, and attract retail investors to take orders.

Memecoin clearly needs a fairer way to start.

Kyle Samani, Managing Partner of Multicoin, once asked the question: Is there an auction to discover the initial price of the memecoin launchpad?

Currently, DeFi protocols such as Hyperliquid have introduced Dutch auctions on their issuance strategies to improve the fairness and transparency of token issuances and reduce insider trading and price manipulation, but they do not target Memecoin assets alone.

Pure Markets, the first native token launch platform of the Unichain ecosystem, is a launch and trading platform built for a purer Memecoin. Pure leverages Uniswap v4's "hooks" feature to quickly find a fair market price for tokens by executing liquidity-guided auctions in the hook contract. In addition, Pure's bond curve dynamics based on the Dutch auction can prevent bots from running away.

Pure is primarily supported by the Doppler protocol. The Doppler agreement, developed by Whetstone Research, closed a $1.3 million pre-seed round in February. Austin Adams, a researcher at Uniswap Labs, is also a core member of Whetstone.

The first native token launch platform in the Unichain ecosystem

In mid-February, the mainnet of Unichain, an L2 designed for DeFi in partnership with Flashbots, leverages the Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) for block building, with the goal of improving market efficiency and fairness by capturing maximum extractable value (MEV) and protecting users from issues such as front-running.

Pure Markets is the first native token launchpad in the Unichain ecosystem, launched after the launch of the Unichain mainnet, and has been extended to Kraken's L2 ink and Coinbase's L2 Base.

At the moment, there are fewer assets on Pure Markets, after all, Unichain's mainnet has only been online for a little more than a month. Its Twitter currently has just over 1,000 followers. Most of the well-known followers are related to the Uniswap team and ecosystem, including Hayden Adams, CEO & Founder of Uniswap Labs. pump.fun co-creator Alon also paid attention to this early-stage competitor project.

There is very little official disclosure of Pure Markets, but judging by its interactions with other projects, Pure Markets should have been founded by Whetstone, the developer of the Doppler's protocol. In addition to Pure Markets, it is also worth noting that the Doppler protocol, Ohara, an application and game creation and asset trading platform in the Base ecosystem, also uses the Doppler protocol to support users to create applications and publish App coin assets in one stop.

Doppler: The protocol behind Pure

The Pure Markets app is primarily supported by the Doppler protocol and is the first front-end application built on top of the Doppler protocol.

Doppler is an Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)-based token launch platform and liquidity bootstrap protocol that supports the creation of arbitrary assets such as Memecoin, RWA, governance tokens, and more. Doppler leverages Uniswap v4's "hooks" feature to simplify the work of integrators by performing liquidity-guided auctions in the hook contract. This design is designed to optimize the liquidity delivery process, helping users get more accurate pricing at a lower cost while retaining more token value.

Whetstone Research, the on-chain protocol development team, designed and developed Doppler. Austin Adams, one of the founders of Whetstone Research, was a researcher at Uniswap Labs and contributed code to the development of Uniswap v4. He is currently an advisor to Uniswap Labs and leads mechanism design at Whetstone Research. In addition, Whetstone's team members also include experts who have worked on other well-known DeFi projects, such as Primitive, and have strong ties to the Uniswap ecosystem.

In February, Whetstone announced the closing of a $1.3 million Pre-Seed round of investors including Variant, Nascent, Credibly Neutral, Uniswap Ventures, Ambush, Figment, and multiple angel investors.

According to the official documentation, the Doppler design principles are as follows:

• Capital efficiency: Like Uniswap, Doppler is optimized to allow the token to quickly find a fair market price.
• MEV protection (anti-sniping): Based on the dynamics of the bond curve (the price starts at a high price and then gradually decreases over time until a buyer is willing to buy at the current price), it prevents bots from running over.
• Programmability: Smart contracts are entirely on-chain and can be combined with other programs. The project team can design how to issue and manage coins, such as setting vesting periods, airdrop rewards, incentive mechanisms, DAO management, etc.
• EVM and DeFI native: Based on the EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine), it can be automatically integrated with DeFi protocols on Ethereum, and the issued tokens can be directly integrated into larger protocols and pools.
• Uniswap compatible: Tokens created on Doppler will be automatically migrated to their own Uniswap v2 or Uniswap v4 pool once they reach a certain level of liquidity and can be traded from Uniswap's supported interfaces.