Robinhood Chain’s Launchpad Boom Faded in Three Months
Pons, the leading token launchpad on Robinhood Chain, now collects about the same daily fees as before September’s surge, and October’s monthly totals confirm the drop was sustained.
Key Takeaways
Galaxy Research’s November 6 chart note tracked Pons’ daily fees through the whole cycle, and DefiLlama’s monthly data and Pons’ own EU filing fill in what that chart leaves out.
The Daily Number Is Back at Its Starting Point
Galaxy, which describes Pons as the leading launchpad on the network, put daily fees at about $250,000 on August 20 and $11.4 million on September 5. By early November they had returned to roughly where they began. Galaxy put the whole cycle at under three months and presented it as a case study in how quickly speculative money leaves once attention moves elsewhere.
Pons is an independent project. It states on its website that it has no affiliation with Robinhood Markets, although it runs on the chain Robinhood took to mainnet in July. Its September peak coincided with the network-wide fee surge Coindoo covered at the time.
The peak itself needs a caution. DefiLlama’s published methodology for Pons V2 records fees from graduated pools when they are swept, so a single day can include fees earned on earlier trades. That limits how much weight the $11.4 million figure can carry on its own. Completed months largely smooth out that timing, which makes them the firmer basis for comparison.
October Shows the Decline Held for a Full Month
| Metric | September | October |
|---|---|---|
| Fees paid by users | $137.1M | $16.8M (−87.8%) |
| Protocol revenue | $23.4M | $2.5M (−89.4%) |
Source: DefiLlama’s combined Pons V1 and V2 data, checked November 8. Percentage changes calculated by Coindoo from unrounded totals.
Adjusting for month length gives almost the same answer. Average daily fees fell from about $4.6 million in September to $540,600 in October, a decline of 88.2%, so October’s extra day changes very little.
The slide also carried past the end of October. Galaxy’s early-November reading of roughly $250,000 a day is less than half October’s daily average. The two figures come from different providers, so the size of that gap is approximate, but its direction matches Galaxy’s description of a full round trip.
Pons Kept a Smaller Share of a Smaller Pie
DefiLlama counted about 17% of September’s fees as Pons revenue. In October the share was about 15%. The fee pool shrank, and the platform’s cut of what remained shrank with it.
Where each Pons trading fee goes
Pons retains 30% of trading fees and directs 80% of that cut to buying and burning PONS, according to its MiCA white paper. Optional V2 creator taxes come on top and go to creators. Creators who switch on buybacks for their own token send half of their share to it, per DefiLlama’s methodology.
Both monthly revenue shares sit well below the protocol cut shown above. DefiLlama’s methodology points to two reasons. Creator taxes on V2 trades are counted as fees but go entirely to creators. And the standard split applies to most pools, not all of them. Monthly totals cannot show which of the two drove the move from 17% to 15%.
The split also shows how little of the revenue line stays with the company. Applying the white paper’s buyback allocation to DefiLlama’s revenue figures gives about $18.7 million directed to PONS purchases in September and about $2 million in October. That leaves roughly $4.7 million and $0.5 million for Pons Labs. These are approximations: the revenue line also contains small per-launch charges outside the buyback split, and the filing allows the team to change the token’s features.
Pons Labs describes itself as financially sound and profitable in the same white paper. It was notified to the Maltese regulator on September 23, close to the fee peak, and published on October 22, before October’s full figures existed. On the estimate above, the company’s own share in October was roughly a tenth of September’s.
PONS Holders Have One Link to the Fees
The filing describes PONS as a memecoin with no voting, governance or utility role. Holders get access to the community forum and nothing else. Their only connection to Pons’ trading income is the buyback-and-burn, which sends purchased tokens to a burn address. By the filing date, more than 30% of the fixed one billion supply had been burned.
That makes October’s revenue figures directly relevant to holders. The buying budget estimated above shrank by close to 89% in a month, in line with revenue, which also slows the pace at which supply is removed. Galaxy reported that PONS market value, once above $600 million, had retraced to about $120 million, without dating the peak.
Burns complicate that comparison. Market value is price multiplied by circulating supply, so part of any market-cap decline reflects fewer tokens rather than a lower price alone. The white paper also sought admission to trading on EU platforms from October 23, naming targets including Kraken and OKX, without confirming listings. Its own risk section ties the token’s long-term value to adoption of the launchpad.
What the Fees Can’t Show, and the Number to Watch
Lower fees can come from fewer traders, smaller or less frequent trades, or a drop in the value of the assets fees are paid in. DefiLlama records V2 fees in each pool’s quote token, often wrapped ether, so ether’s price moves the dollar totals too. Separating these causes requires tracking the wallets that traded during the August–September surge and counting how many returned. It also requires checking whether a small group of addresses now produces most of the remaining fees. Those figures do not appear in the public dashboards cited here.
A smaller business is not a dead one. Graduated pools keep generating swap fees after launch day, so income does not depend on a steady stream of new tokens. At Galaxy’s early-November rate, a 30-day month would bring in about $7.5 million in fees.
That figure sets the test. DefiLlama’s November total, available once the month closes, will show which reading holds. A result near $7.5 million would mean early November marked a level the platform held. A result well below it would mean the decline that ran through October continued into a third month.
Kosta has reported on cryptocurrency markets and blockchain infrastructure since 2020, bringing over six years of hands-on experience in the crypto industry built through daily tracking of markets, trends, and emerging blockchain developments. Specializing in Bitcoin on-chain analysis, institutional ETF flows, and digital asset price action, his work at Coindoo has been cited by other news agencies and consistently covers market developments with a focus on data-driven reporting across Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, and XRP. Over the years, Kosta has contributed to multiple crypto media outlets in different regions, authoring over 6,000 articles across the sector. His reporting spans cryptocurrency markets and the broader fintech industry, tracking not only price action but also the technological and regulatory forces shaping the ecosystem. To support his analysis, Kosta actively leverages on-chain data and metrics from leading platforms such as Santiment, Glassnode, and CryptoQuant, enabling deeper, evidence-based market insights. He believes in the power of transparency and the data that underpins the blockchain ecosystem. His academic background in Marketing Management from Denmark further complements his analytical approach, adding a strong understanding of communication strategy and content positioning to his work.
