Author: Zhou, ChainCatcher

During this time, discussions in the market about Robinhood Chain have been increasing, and Pons is an unavoidable topic. The latest data shows that the cumulative trading volume of Pons has exceeded $5 billion, with over 63% of the trading volume on the Robinhood Chain Launchpad completed through Pons during the same period.

In the past month, the price of PONS tokens has increasedapproximately 20 times. On September 2, PONS was launched on Binance Alpha, and its current market value has exceeded $500 million, with a 24-hour increase of over 40%.

Pons is a token launch platform built on Robinhood Chain. In less than two months since its launch, it has become the most active application on this new public chain, with token creators having accumulated over $28.7 million in transaction fee distributions through it.

A team that almost nobody knows the background of has established itself as a leading entity in the industry within two months. This is the story of Pons and a key clue to understanding the early ecosystem of Robinhood Chain.

From taking over Noxa's traffic to entering Pools.trade

Robinhood Chain officially launched its mainnet on July 1. At the beginning of its launch, the leading entity in the field was the launchpad Noxa.

However, Noxa suspended new token launches in mid-July, and traffic quickly shifted to the newly emerging Pons. In just one week, Pons completed over 66,000 token issuances, and the cumulative trading volume of platform tokens exceeded $380 million, with market share surpassing 50% for several consecutive days.

WLFI advisor Ogle publicly revealed his holdings on Robinhood Chain, with PONS listed as his second-largest position, after Lighter (the current total value of his PONS holdings has risen to approximately $5.4 million).

In late July, Robinhood co-founder and CEO Vlad Tenev followed Pons founder Ozzy on Twitter, which shot PONS' market value up to $39 million.

At the beginning of August, the competitive landscape began to change. The launchpad pools.trade, launched by Uniswap, went live on Robinhood Chain on August 5, creating 10,506 tokens on its first day, surpassing Pons's 7,210 during the same period. Uniswap itself is the underlying infrastructure relied upon by Pons's liquidity pool, and with the official entry of similar products, competition in the entire field tightened up.

Pons's daily token issuance volume also dropped from a high of just over 20,000 in mid-July to only around 1,000 in mid-August. It wasn't until around August 24 that Pons's daily token issuance began to rebound, with trading volume and PONS prices rising almost concurrently, reaching over 20,000 again by the end of August, setting a new high. During the same time, Pons was also promoting a mechanism upgrade.

As of now, the Pons team has not publicly disclosed a complete list of members. The founder's Twitter account is MEADGod (Ozzy), and the bio mentions RootsFi.

It is reported that in May 2025, he introduced RootsFi at the Berachain governance forum under the same identity, positioning it as a native lending protocol with the stablecoin MEAD. RootsFi later underwent a transformation, and its current official website has rebranded as a payment network.

Mechanism upgrade to V2, RWA accounts for only 5%

The initial model of Pons was very simple: after the token creation, it directly entered the liquidity pool of Uniswap V3 without a combined curve or subsequent migration, with trading happening in the same pool from the first second.

The creation fee was fixed at 0.0005 ETH, with a trading fee of 1%, of which 70% goes to the creator and 30% to the protocol. The tokens issued in the early phase still retain the old ratio of 90% for creators and 10% for the protocol. From the portion obtained by the protocol, 80% will be used to buy and burn PONS via TWAP.

The new version, V2, has changed to a joint curve priced in ETH. After the tokens are sold on the curve, they automatically graduate, and liquidity is permanently locked into the Uniswap V4 position, from which creators can no longer withdraw. The priced assets have also expanded from a single ETH to other tokens approved by the platform, including stablecoins and some tokenized stocks.

This mechanism advances the issuance process and anti-sniping design further; the specific incremental benefit remains to be seen, but from the product perspective, it has indeed moved forward a generation.

As of early September, PONS has cumulatively burned 293 million tokens, accounting for 29.33% of the maximum issuance. The number of holding addresses has exceeded 62,000. On the platform level, nearly 600,000 tokens have been issued, and over 150,000 independent creators have participated, with the protocol's cumulative income reaching approximately $4.97 million.

In the entire launchpad field of Robinhood Chain, according to Dune panel data, since July, Pons has ranked first in token issuance volume, on-chain transaction volume, and number of traders, with the trading volume accounting for over half of the total from several major launchpads.

In addition, the combination of stocks and Memes is becoming a larger trend on Robinhood Chain. According to KOL Dayu's analysis, once stock tokens are massively launched on-chain, the first issue to address is actually the liquidity problem—thousands of stocks, each requires someone to create a pool with no standard answer on how large it should be.

Memes provide a low-cost solution; once a Meme coin paired with a stock starts running, the corresponding liquidity pool will naturally grow with transactions, eliminating the need for someone to build it specifically. Conversely, stocks provide Memes with real-world value anchors and narratives.

In his view, this bidirectional complementarity is the core logic behind why stocks and Memes can thrive on Robinhood Chain, rather than merely a narrative gimmick.

Pons is also trying to integrate stock token trading into its system; this part currently accounts for about 5% of the platform's total trading volume, corresponding to approximately $174 million in cumulative trading volume and 310 stock token trading pairs. However, this is not Pons's main battlefield, as the RWA ratios of long.xyz, o1.exchange, and bankr on the same chain are 70.2%, 67.2%, and 35.9% respectively, which are significantly higher than Pons.

Supporting half of Robinhood Chain's revenue?

Robinhood Chain has only been online for a little over two months, yet it has already surpassed Ethereum, BSC, Solana, and Base in terms of revenue dimensions.

As of September 3, the DEX trading volume on Robinhood Chain in the past 24 hours was about $1.85 billion, second only to Solana, surpassing Ethereum mainnet, BSC, and Base.

During the same period, the fees generated by this chain were about $4.45 million, three times the total of Solana, Ethereum, BSC, and Base, with on-chain revenues of about $4.01 million, close to 14 times the total of these four chains.

In the DeFiLlama income ranking, based on protocol revenue, Pons ranks as the ninth single application. The on-chain data analysis platform Bubblemaps reports that the fee income generated by PONS daily is about $4.73 million, surpassing the combined total of Hyperliquid, Polymarket, and Fomo at the application level.

Regarding graduation rates, July statistics show that Pons has issued approximately 67,000 tokens, with 529 reaching the graduation threshold, a ratio of less than 0.8%. By early September, the official website showed a total of 742 graduated tokens, while the cumulative issuance had risen to nearly 600,000, with the graduation rate dropping to around 0.11%.

KOL 0xLoki reminded that newly issued tokens and projects that haven’t taken off yet carry the highest risks, and investing in Memecoin liquidity pools requires readiness for potential total loss. On the same launchpad, many long-tail tokens have high holding concentration marked in red, with some projects having the top addresses holding over 80%, making it hard for such tokens to withstand price pressure if big holders sell off.

Additionally, it is worth noting that Robinhood Chain has provided users with 90 days of gas fee waivers since its mainnet launch, which will expire at the end of September. Currently, this daily issuance density of 20,000 tokens largely relies on nearly zero-cost issuance, and whether this rhythm can be maintained after the subsidy is removed is still uncertain.

Trader Timo compared Pons' revenue performance with the historical peaks of Virtual, stating that such growth is difficult to maintain in the long term, and expressed doubts about whether the buyback ratio could be implemented genuinely, how long the income can last, and whether the liquidity is sufficient.

KOL Blue Fox pointed out that Pons's strategy is to bring Pump.fun to Robinhood Chain, noting that the gameplay is not new, and while traffic and attention are present, it is uncertain how long it can last. Others have noted that they have seen many projects that replicate the Pump model and switch chains; switching chains does not equate to solving fundamental issues, and most end up being just a market trend.

Pons may prove the success of Robinhood Chain, but whether it can turn into a platform that consistently creates wealth effects remains unanswered by the market.