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Key Takeaways
- Pons generated nearly $6 million in fees over 24 hours, more than Robinhood Chain itself and ahead of rivals like Pump and Hyperliquid.
- The platform has produced roughly 646,000 tokens from over 167,000 creator addresses since its July launch.
- Buybacks and burns have removed 29% of PONS’s original supply from circulation, helping drive a roughly 300% weekly price surge.
Pons, an app that lets users create and trade tokens on Robinhood’s blockchain, generated nearly $6 million in fees over 24 hours this week, more than Robinhood Chain itself collected on the same network. The surge places a third-party memecoin launchpad among the largest fee-generating protocols in crypto, according to data from DefiLlama.
Fees Rank Pons Above Pump and Hyperliquid
Users paid about $5.95 million in fees through Pons over 24 hours, according to DefiLlama’s fee tracker, ranking the app fourth among all protocols the data provider tracks, behind only Tether, Uniswap and Circle.
That put Pons ahead of rival token-launch platform Pump, which collected $4.64 million in the same period, and well above Hyperliquid, the perpetual futures platform, which took in about $2 million. Robinhood Chain itself collected roughly $4 million in fees over the same 24 hours, less than Pons generated on top of it.
Robinhood launched its blockchain in July with tokenized stocks positioned as its flagship product. Memecoins and other user-created tokens have instead become a major source of the network’s early activity and fee generation.
How the Token Factory Works
Pons functions as a factory for new tokens that become tradable within minutes of creation. A user picks a name and symbol, pays a launch fee of about $1 through the app, and a trading market for the token opens on Robinhood Chain.
Pons then collects a share of every subsequent trade, splitting that revenue between the protocol itself and the token’s original creator.
Nearly 25,000 new tokens launched through Pons on September 2 alone, up almost 19% from the prior day, while 24-hour trading volume reached $544 million, according to Pons’s own analytics dashboard. Data from Dune Analytics shows the platform has produced roughly 646,000 tokens from more than 167,000 unique creator addresses since its July launch.
Buybacks and Burns Have Pushed the PONS Token Higher
Pons’s own technical documentation states that the protocol uses most of its retained funds to buy its native PONS token on the open market and permanently remove it from circulation.
That mechanism creates recurring buying pressure while reducing supply, a dynamic that has likely contributed to PONS surging roughly 300% over the past week.
On-chain data reviewed through Dune Analytics shows about 293 million PONS tokens, or 29% of the token’s original supply, have already been removed from circulation through this process.
A Handful of Tokens Hold Most of the Category’s Value
Despite hundreds of thousands of token launches, value within the Robinhood Chain memecoin ecosystem remains concentrated in a few names. According to CoinGecko data, the largest token native to the network, Cash Cat, is worth about $254 million, followed by Goose Token at nearly $78 million and Chump Coin at roughly $30 million.
The entire category of Robinhood Chain-native tokens is worth approximately $577 million combined, meaning a small handful of tokens account for a large share of that total.
Robinhood’s Own Earnings Reflect a Smaller Direct Cut
Robinhood Chain’s $4 million single-day fee total was its largest since launch, bringing the network’s cumulative fees to nearly $20 million, meaning roughly one-fifth of its entire lifetime fee total arrived in a single 24-hour period. The network’s analytics dashboard shows it has retained about $18 million of that total, or close to 90 cents of every dollar generated in fees.
Those network-level fee totals should not be read as direct corporate revenue for Robinhood Markets. On the company’s second-quarter earnings call, Chief Financial Officer Shiv Verma said Robinhood’s actual monetization is calculated differently. Verma said:
“On the monetization piece, per transaction, we make a few basis points. Not per volume, it’s per transaction.”
Verma added that Robinhood shares roughly half of that per-transaction take with Arbitrum, the blockchain infrastructure partner underlying Robinhood Chain.
Robinhood Chief Executive Vlad Tenev told investors on the same call that stock tokens remained a product he was especially enthusiastic about, but acknowledged outside developers had already found unexpected uses for the network.
“We have gotten a lot of developer activity too. Developers are building applications the company had not anticipated”.
Robinhood Shares Rally Alongside the Activity
Robinhood shares closed 3.4% higher at $106.99 the day the fee data was reported, then surged 15% the following day, outperforming most other crypto-linked stocks as Bitcoin approached $80,000.
Morgan Stanley upgraded Robinhood’s stock this week, citing growth across the company’s broader product lineup rather than any single factor tied to the memecoin activity on its blockchain.
