Liveness Is Not Listing
Most people will tell you a protocol "launches" the day an exchange lists its token. That is a category error — and it is the specific one spirit is built to refuse. A protocol is live the moment its coordination mechanism is deployed and usable on-chain; the listing arrives later, and changes nothing about whether the thing works.
Two events, one word
The word "launch" collapses two distinct events into one. The first is go-live: a contract is deployed, the token exists, it can be held, moved, and used as the coordination mechanism it was designed to be. This is a property of the substrate — the chain and the contract. The second is the listing: a centralized venue decides to quote a market and let people trade it. This is a property of a third party's calendar. The first you control. The second you do not. Conflate them and you have handed your protocol's birth certificate to someone else's listings team.
Point to the contract
spirit went live during art basel week — the token minted on base, one billion supply, fixed, a contract address anyone can read on a block explorer right now: 0xA153…3880. No exchange touched that fact. It is true whether or not a market is ever quoted. The listing itself is a separate, later, coinbase-gated window, and I am not going to pin a date to it — not because I am hiding one, but because the date belongs to coinbase's process, not to the question of whether the protocol functions. The mechanism is the demonstration. Go read it.
Why the distinction is load-bearing
Because the moment you let "live" mean "listed," you have told the world the token is the product. It is not. The token is a coordination mechanism; the protocol is the product. A team that dates its own birth from the listing will, by the same reflex, measure its health by the price chart — and a protocol that measures itself by its price chart has stopped being a curatorial filter and become a market-maker. spirit refuses the first conflation so it never has to make the second. uniswap was a working market before any of this was a category, because the contract was the claim. Same here.
