Overview
$PURE is the first live instance of the PURITY standard — deployed under the same constraints the standard imposes on every launch, with no special treatment and no exceptions. It is not a governance primitive, a funding mechanism, or an ownership claim on anything. It exists to demonstrate that the model functions in production, and to anchor the ecosystem that builds on it.
$PURE has not yet launched. It deploys on Base. Its confirmed parameters are published in Token Economy and Reference.
What $PURE is (and is not)
$PURE is the proof-of-concept and reference implementation of the standard, and the recipient of the ecosystem contributions every subsequent PURITY launch makes. $PURE is not a claim on platform revenue, a requirement for participating in other launches, a governance token with discretionary power, or a promise of distributions or price behaviour.
No privileged path to ownership exists. Open-market purchase is the only way to acquire $PURE — for the team, for supporters, for everyone — which is the same rule every PURITY launch lives under. See Buying $PURE.
The token contract
PurityToken is intentionally minimal: a fixed-supply ERC-20 with the ERC20Votes extension, no transfer taxes, no fees, no hooks, no rebasing, no pause switch, and no minting after deployment. Name and symbol are hardcoded ("Purity" / "PURE"); third-party launches use the parameterised template instead.
Burning exists in exactly one gated form: the Treasury may burn tokens it holds. This is shutdown machinery — the Treasury burns its inventory at shutdown, and holders burn tokens to claim their pro-rata share of the shutdown pool. There is no public burn and no burn during normal operation.
Two launch-specific behaviours, both covered in the Protocol section, apply identically here: the launch whitelist (all supply confined to Treasury and pair until trading opens; lifted irreversibly inside launch()) and voting auto-delegation (holders are self-delegated on first receipt, so governance participation requires no setup step; the Treasury and pair are excluded).
All economic behaviour is externalised into the Treasury. The token itself contains no economics — which keeps its attack surface near zero and its behaviour fully predictable.
Governance and arbitration
$PURE deploys with governance on: treasury releases require a holder vote (proposable only by the team address, capped at 20% of market-making WETH / 2% of supply), and shutdown requires holder authorisation before the arbitrator can act. The arbitrator is a Gnosis Safe 2-of-3 multisig, published ahead of launch.
One honest caveat belongs here rather than in a footnote: for $PURE — and only for $PURE — the launching team and the arbitrator are the same body. The conflict this creates, and its mitigations, are treated squarely in Risk & Limitations.
Why $PURE exists
By subjecting itself to every constraint it asks others to accept — supporter-funded launch, no team tokens, vested base-asset compensation, holder-gated treasury, deterministic shutdown — the standard removes the "do as I say, not as I do" asymmetry that undermines most launch platforms. Whatever value accrues to $PURE emerges from its own market behaviour and from ecosystem adoption under strict constraints. It is both an asset and the standard's reference implementation, and it is meant to be judged as both.