Pons, a memecoin launchpad on Robinhood Chain, has outearned Solana’s Pump.fun in daily fees every single day since August 29 — pulling in 4.89 million USD on August 31 alone, on a network where gas costs users literally nothing — and processing 4 billion USD in cumulative volume with more than 10,000 token deployments per day.
By Priya Sharma | September 5, 2026
The numbers would be remarkable for any DeFi protocol. For a launchpad most of crypto Twitter has never heard of, they are a warning shot. Pons copied Pump.fun’s playbook and dropped it onto a chain with a 90-day gas waiver — and that single variable, “actually free” versus “almost free,” appears to have been the only thing that mattered.
The Hook: The Fee Machine Nobody Saw Coming
Pons charges a flat 1% fee on every trade involving tokens launched through its platform. That fee splits roughly 70/30: token creators take the larger share, the protocol keeps the rest. Creators have earned more than 25 million USD in cumulative fees since launch. Compare that to most launchpads, which extract value and give nothing back, and the flywheel becomes obvious — a creator launches a token, promotes it, drives volume, earns fees from that trading, and comes back the next day to launch five more.
Most of those 10,000 daily tokens will go to zero, and everyone involved knows it. But the volume the tokens generate while alive feeds the fee machine, which feeds the creators, who feed the volume. It is a loop that sustains itself as long as attention stays on the chain.
The Evidence: Zero Gas Changes Everything
- Daily fee record — Pons has beaten Pump.fun in daily fees every day since August 29, hitting 4.89 million USD on August 31.
- Cumulative volume — roughly 4 billion USD processed platform-wide, a pace that took Pump.fun months longer to reach.
- Creator payouts — over 25 million USD in cumulative creator fees through the 70/30 split.
- Chain revenue gap — Robinhood Chain generated 4.01 million USD in daily revenue on September 2, versus 78,000 USD for Solana the same day, per crypto.news.
- Token rally — PONS surged from 0.078 USD on August 24 to 0.43 USD by September 1, an 18,000% gain since July, pushing its market cap past 307 million USD.
Robinhood Chain is an Arbitrum Orbit layer-2 — think of it as an express lane built beside the main highway — that launched a 90-day gas waiver on July 1. Every transaction is free until roughly September 29. On Solana, gas is a fraction of a cent per trade; for a degen executing hundreds of swaps a day, those fractions add up. On Robinhood Chain during the waiver, the only cost is Pons’ 1% fee, and 70% of that goes back to the person who created the token being traded. The behavioral difference between “almost free” and “actually free” turned out to be enormous.
The Core Conflict: Real Revenue, Fragile Foundation
The PONS rally differs from a typical memecoin pump in one respect: it is backed by real fee revenue measured in millions of dollars per day. That does not mean the token is fairly valued at 307 million USD — roughly 29% of supply has been burned, tightening the float and amplifying moves in both directions, and daily volume regularly exceeds 100 million USD, meaning the token is liquid enough to exit fast and volatile enough to lose half its value in a bad week.
Uniswap Labs has entered the ring. The team bought PONS tokens, publicly stating the purchase was “for long-term alignment,” then launched its own competing platform, pools.trade, on Robinhood Chain on August 5 with lower fees than Pons. Institutional money is circling — which validates the market and threatens the incumbent at the same time.
Then there is the deadline hanging over everything: the gas waiver expires around September 29. When traders have to start paying for transactions again, the economics that made Pons explode get rewired overnight. Prior coverage on this site has already flagged that ARK researchers attribute most Robinhood Chain activity to a small circle of heavy traders rather than the exchange’s 28.4 million retail customers — meaning the whole boom may rest on a few thousand very active wallets.
Market Implications: What This Means for Your Portfolio
For DeFi users, the takeaway is not “buy PONS.” It is that fee structure and gas policy are now competitive weapons — protocols that route around friction win, and chains that subsidize gas can buy temporary dominance. Watch the September 29 waiver expiry as a live experiment: if Pons volume survives the return of gas fees, the model is durable; if it collapses, the entire Robinhood Chain revenue narrative gets repriced. Also note the concentration risk — most of the chain’s app revenue flows through one launchpad, and one 14-minute network outage on September 4 was enough to rattle traders.
The backdrop is choppy: Bitcoin traded near 81,430 USD and Solana near 105 USD in the site’s latest price snapshot, after jobs data briefly knocked Bitcoin below 80,000 USD on September 4.
The Verdict
Pons vs Pump.fun is not really a fight between two launchpads. It is proof that in memecoins, the chain with the lowest total friction captures the casino. Pump.fun built the model; Pons proved the model is portable the moment someone removes the last fraction of a cent of cost. Whether that dominance survives September 29 — and whether Uniswap’s lower-fee entry erodes it first — will tell DeFi investors everything they need to know about where the next fee war gets fought.
The cryptocurrency market remains highly volatile. This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice.
two months of printing is also two months for pump.fun to copy the 70 percent creator split. the moat is a config setting anyone can copy
config setting is right but pump.fun copying the 70 percent split torpedoes their own revenue overnight. hurts them more than it helps pons
pump.fun copying the 70 percent split kills their margin but they keep the liquidity and the brand. config settings are not moats, distribution is
distribution is the moat until robinhood itself ships a first party launchpad. the platform eating its own app is the actual tail risk here
pump.fun matching the 70 percent split torpedoes their own margin to defend the brand. pons keeps the flywheel either way, decent position to negotiate from
4B in volume on a chain where nobody can name a second app. waiver ends sept 29 and we find out what was real
sept 29 is the reveal. if volume holds with gas back on, the 70 percent split was the moat all along and free gas was just marketing
PONS at 307 million market cap on an 18,000 percent run is the last thing I would touch here. The 70/30 fee split is the actual innovation
18k percent runners are for people who bought day one. the fee split thesis works whether the token is at 307 million or down 80 from here
10,000 deployments a day means token names are about to get real weird. give it two weeks before some pons native memecoin flips TONIC and the irony completes itself
4.89M in daily fees on a chain where gas is free. pump.fun got outearned by its own clone, brutal
the 90 day gas waiver is doing all the work here. when it expires we find out if pons keeps printing or dies quietly
even if gas comes back at a tenth of a cent pons still wins on the split. creators taking 70 percent is why the deployers showed up, free gas was just the door prize
10k launches a day means dilution eats any alpha instantly. everyone buying token 9,847 of the day is exit liquidity with extra steps
10k tokens launched per day and creators pulled 25M in fees. its a casino, but at least this house pays its dealers
4.89M in daily fees on a chain where gas costs nothing. pump.fun got outcompeted by exactly one variable, free vs almost free
the 90 day gas waiver expiring is the part nobody prices in. the whole thesis dies if robinhood chain starts charging gas again
waiver question is the right one but it runs into november, so theres a couple months of printing left before anyone has to answer it
if volume drifts back to solana the day the waiver expires, pons was never a product, just a rebate. that week is the real test
nov 27ish is waiver expiry. i already got the date circled, if pons fees hold at even 30 percent of current after that its a real product
10,000 token launches a day and 25M cumulative to creators. the flywheel math checks out but 99 percent of those tokens are pure trash. the fees are real tho
99 percent trash and still 4B in cumulative volume, the trash IS the product. pump.fun proved that first, pons just made the rake cheaper
outearning pump.fun every single day since aug 29 on a gasless chain is the cleanest fee economics experiment this year. when the waiver expires we get the second half
robinhood chain volume from retail that never heard the word memecoin outside the app. pons is what happens when the onboarding and the casino are the same button
4.89m in a day on a flat 1 percent fee with a 70/30 creator split. creators minting on pons get paid to shill their own token, pump.fun never had that incentive