A Fairer Launch Method? Explaining Pure, the First Memecoin Launch Platform in the Unichain Ecosystem

Author: Nianqing, ChainCatcher

In February this year, with the exposure of LIBRA and the "cartel," the era of狂欢 surrounding Pump.fun and memecoins officially came to an end.

Memecoins originally started as a fun and relatively pure PvP game. However, as token creation became industrialized, memecoins have evolved into predatory games dominated by internal cartels. Initially, occasional wealth effects masked manipulative practices by insiders, but as orchestrators grew greedier, retail investors were repeatedly exploited, liquidity dried up, and eventually no one wanted to play such a rigged game anymore.

Beyond cartels, many current token launch platforms—including Pump.fun—face serious fairness issues, such as widespread sniping bots and fake volume bots that scoop up tokens at low prices, artificially inflate prices, fabricate market trends, and lure retail traders into buying at inflated levels.

Clearly, memecoins need a fairer way to launch.

Kyle Samani, managing partner at Multicoin, once posed a question: Is there a memecoin launch platform that uses auctions to discover initial pricing?

Currently, some DeFi protocols like Hyperliquid have already introduced Dutch auctions into their issuance strategies, improving fairness and transparency in token distribution while reducing insider trading and price manipulation—but they aren't specifically designed for memecoin assets.

Pure Markets, the first native token launch platform in the Unichain ecosystem, is built precisely to enable purer memecoin launches and trading. Pure leverages Uniswap v4’s “hooks” functionality, executing liquidity bootstrapping auctions within hook contracts to help tokens quickly find a fair market price. Additionally, Pure's use of a Dutch auction bond curve dynamically prevents bot frontrunning.

Pure is primarily powered by the Doppler Protocol. Developed by Whetstone Research, Doppler raised $1.3 million in a Pre-Seed round in February. Key members of Whetstone include Austin Adams, a researcher at Uniswap Labs.

The First Native Token Launch Platform in the Unichain Ecosystem

In mid-February, Unichain launched its mainnet. Unichain is a Layer 2 blockchain purpose-built for DeFi, collaborating with Flashbots and leveraging Trusted Execution Environments (TEE) for block building. Its goal is to capture Maximum Extractable Value (MEV) while protecting users from issues like frontrunning, thereby enhancing market efficiency and fairness.

Pure Markets is the first native token launch platform on Unichain, launching shortly after the mainnet went live. It has since expanded to Kraken’s L2, ink, and Coinbase’s L2, Base.

Currently, there are few assets listed on Pure Markets—understandable given that Unichain’s mainnet has only been live for just over a month. The project’s Twitter account has just over 1,000 followers. Notable followers are mostly from the Uniswap team and ecosystem, including Hayden Adams, CEO and founder of Uniswap Labs. Alon, co-founder of pump.fun, also follows this early-stage competitor.

Official information about Pure Markets is scarce, but based on interactions with other projects, it appears that Pure Markets was founded by Whetstone, the developer behind the Doppler Protocol. Besides Pure Markets, the Doppler Protocol itself is also worth noting—Ohara, a platform for creating applications and launching App coins in the Base ecosystem, also uses Doppler to allow users to build apps and issue assets in one integrated workflow.

Doppler: The Protocol Behind Pure

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

Doppler is a token launch and liquidity bootstrapping protocol built on the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), supporting the creation of any type of asset—including memecoins, RWAs, and governance tokens. By leveraging Uniswap v4’s “hooks” feature, Doppler executes liquidity bootstrapping auctions directly within hook contracts, simplifying integration for developers. This design aims to optimize liquidity provision, enabling users to achieve more accurate pricing at lower cost while preserving greater token value.

The protocol was designed and developed by Whetstone Research, a blockchain development team. Austin Adams, one of Whetstone’s founders, previously worked as a researcher at Uniswap Labs and contributed code to Uniswap v4. He currently serves as an advisor to Uniswap Labs while leading mechanism design efforts at Whetstone. Other team members have prior experience at well-known DeFi projects such as Primitive, maintaining close ties to the broader Uniswap ecosystem.

In February, Whetstone announced it had secured $1.3 million in Pre-Seed funding from Variant, Nascent, Credibly Neutral, Uniswap Ventures, Ambush, Figment, and several angel investors.

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

• Capital Efficiency: Like Uniswap, Doppler is highly optimized to help tokens quickly converge on a fair market price.

• MEV Protection (Anti-Sniping): Utilizes a Dutch auction-style bonding curve—starting at a high price that gradually decreases over time until a buyer purchases—effectively preventing bots from frontrunning.

• Programmability: Smart contracts are fully on-chain and composable with other programs. Project teams can customize how they launch and manage tokens—setting vesting schedules, airdrop rewards, incentive mechanisms, DAO governance, etc.

• EVM and DeFi Native: Built on EVM, enabling automatic integration with existing DeFi protocols on Ethereum. Tokens issued via Doppler can seamlessly enter larger ecosystems and liquidity pools.

• Uniswap Compatibility: Once a token reaches a certain liquidity threshold on Doppler, it will automatically migrate to its own Uniswap v2 or Uniswap v4 pool and become tradable through any interface supported by Uniswap.