A meme coin launchpad called Pons generated nearly $6 million in fees Thursday, outearning Pump (CRYPTO: PUMP), Hyperliquid, and the Robinhood (NASDAQ:HOOD) Chain it runs on.
Pons Turns $1 Token Launches Into a $6 Million Fee Machine
According to CoinDesk, Pons lets anyone create and launch a tradable token on Robinhood Chain for about $1.
Once launched, Pons collects a cut of every subsequent trade, splitting revenue between the protocol and token creators.
Nearly 25,000 new tokens launched through the platform on September 2 alone, up 19% from the prior day, with 24-hour trading volume hitting $544 million.
Since July, Pons has produced roughly 646,000 tokens from more than 167,000 unique creator addresses.
The platform also uses a portion of its retained fees to buy and burn its own PONS token, removing 29% of the original supply from circulation. That buyback mechanism likely contributed to PONS surging 300% over the past week.
How It Stacks Up Against the Competition
DefiLlama data cited by CoinDesk shows Pons ranked fourth by 24-hour fees across all tracked protocols, sitting behind only Tether (CRYPTO: USDT), Uniswap (CRYPTO: UNI), and Circle (NYSE:CRCL).
Pump generated $4.64 million over the same period, Robinhood Chain itself took about $4 million, and Hyperliquid as measured by Hyperliquid Strategies (NASDAQ:PURR) brought in roughly $2 million.
Wednesday was Robinhood Chain’s biggest single day ever, with roughly one-fifth of its entire lifetime fee total since July arriving in a single 24-hour period.
Why This Matters for Robinhood
Robinhood launched its Layer-2 chain in July around tokenized stocks, but memecoins have become the dominant fee driver.
CEO Vlad Tenev acknowledged on the Q2 earnings call that outside developers were already building on the network “in ways that we have not thought of.”
CFO Shiv Verma added that the company earns a few basis points per transaction rather than per volume, splitting roughly half with Arbitrum (CRYPTO: ARB), making transaction count the more meaningful metric than raw fee dollars.
On Thursday, HOOD surged more than 15% as Bitcoin pushed toward $80,000, with Morgan Stanley upgrading the stock this week on broader product growth.
The stock now trades about 21% above its 20-day moving average at $101.78 and roughly 29.6% above its 200-day moving average at $95.06, putting it in extended territory after a sharp run.
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