On September 3, crypto KOL Rune revealed that the top trader on the social trading platform fomo, Bonk Guy, is 64 years old this year. According to the position shared by Bonk Guy, he invested about $67,000 to buy the platform token PONS from the Robinhood launchpad, with paper gains approaching 9100%. Behind this position is a fierce launchpad battle on the Robinhood Chain over the past period.
The 64-Year-Old Hunter
Three years ago, Bonk Guy (@theunipcs) used $16,000 in principal and 6 times leverage to go long on BONK, at one point achieving an eight-figure floating gain, but was fully liquidated during last October's black swan event. This time, he reappears at the top of the profit list, relying on a batch of tokens on the Robinhood Chain: PONS, USELESS, Marscoin. By the end of August, his publicly disclosed spot trading profit had exceeded $10 million, with profits over the past 30 days exceeding $5.7 million, and the overall value of his account holdings once surged to $15.74 million.
His 9100% increase relies on hitting the self-reinforcing pricing mechanism of PONS on the Robinhood Chain. How this mechanism operates determines how much he can earn and the direction this launchpad battle will take next.
Pons
Pons, operated by Pons Labs, issues a fixed amount of 1 billion for each new token, with a creation cost of only 0.0005 ETH and a transaction fee of 1%. Of this, 70% goes to the token creator and 30% to the protocol; of the portion received by the protocol, 80% is used to repurchase and destroy PONS on the secondary market, with the remaining 20% retained for team operations. This design ties the "issuance and trading frequency of new tokens" to "the repurchase and destruction of PONS": the more new tokens created and the more active the trading, the more transaction fees are generated, part of which continuously transforms into market buy pressure and destruction volume for PONS, directly linking the platform's trading activity with the supply and demand relationship of PONS.
With this mechanism, Pons captured the largest wave of traffic after the NOXA platform halted token issuance in mid-July, and its share continued to expand: by early September, its token issuance accounted for about 66% of the total chain share, and the trading volume generated by newly issued tokens through Pons accounted for 78% of the total trading volume of new tokens on the chain. On September 3, Pons' daily protocol fees exceeded Pump.fun, surpassing $6 million, and its token PONS valuation subsequently reached a historical high of approximately $970 million, with a weekly increase of over 200%, and currently about 29% of the total supply has been repurchased and destroyed. After the V2 launch of Pons in August, new tokens can be traded in pairs with stocks like Nvidia, Apple, and Robinhood after completing the graduation phase.
LONG
If the core of Pons is cash flow repurchase, LONG is initially betting on narrative—directly bundling stock tokens and Memes into one product. Launched in early September, LongX packages a 3x leveraged position of Nvidia as a token and opens trading pairs with Meme tokens; the Meme token Artificial Inu, which has the highest market cap on the LONG platform, is paired with the Nvidia stock token, briefly reaching a market cap of over $200 million, with an increase far exceeding the simultaneous price of Nvidia's spot stocks. Considering it overlays leveraged stock positions with Meme trading attributes, its price does not simply follow the underlying stock fluctuations but is also influenced by leveraged mechanisms and on-chain speculative sentiment. LONG also designed a "community model": part of the transaction fee is automatically burned, while another part is locked into a treasury, attempting to use the logic of capital accumulation to differentiate stock-Meme pairings. Currently, besides Artificial Inu, Meme coins paired with Costco, Micron, SpaceX, etc., on the LONG platform have also reached tens of millions in market cap, vying for the second-in-command spot on the platform.
Pools
In early August, Uniswap Labs directly launched a launchpad on the Robinhood Chain. On the day Pools went live, founder Hayden Adams publicly referred to high-fee launchpads in the market as "predatory," implicitly criticizing platforms like Pons with their 1% fee model. Pools' approach is the opposite: transaction fees are only 0.25%, and creators can choose to take away 0.05% of it, while the remaining portion is automatically reinvested into a permanently locked liquidity pool, without charging any additional launchpad fees; tokens can access the Uniswap web interface, wallets, routing APIs, as well as third-party integrations like MetaMask and Ledger, effectively making it possible for newly issued tokens to be seen by the entire Uniswap ecosystem right away. On its first day, Pools captured 40-50% of the total issuance and trading volume on the entire chain, significantly challenging Pons' leading position. Pons relies on user stickiness established through its first-mover and repurchase mechanisms, while Pools leans on the reputation of the DeFi team behind it and lower fees; both strategies are currently engaging in direct confrontation.
In addition to these three, the Robinhood Chain also hosts several other launchpads, each occupying different niche directions, like PAIR focusing on stock basket pairings, CLUTCH in the community plus NFT direction, Pools fun collaborating with Sushi, and Hood Dev for developers.
Join if you can’t beat them?
At the beginning of August, Pools once claimed 40-50% of the total issuance and trading volume on the chain but couldn't maintain that advantage: by early September, Pons' market share had surpassed again, with an issuance ratio of about 66% and a new token trading volume ratio of about 78%. The low rates and official distribution channels of Pools ultimately did not shake Pons' leading position.
More interestingly, the competitive relationship had not ended, but Uniswap Labs' identity had changed first.
On September 4, Uniswap Labs announced it acquired PONS, with neither the amount nor the holding percentage disclosed. Following the announcement, PONS surged approximately 40% within hours.
On one hand, its own Pools is competing with Pons for the launchpad entry of the Robinhood Chain; on the other hand, Uniswap Labs has become an investor in PONS.
Thus, the market began to interpret this investment as a rather dramatic remark: Join if you can’t beat them. However, what Uniswap Labs is interested in may not just be Pons as a competitor, but the complete flywheel formed on the Robinhood Chain involving launches, trading, transaction fees, and the value capture of platform tokens. Pools can continue vying for the issuance entry, while PONS allows Uniswap Labs to simultaneously bet on the current most successful traffic aggregation point on this chain.
Behind the Excitement: A Deadline
The launchpad battle on the Robinhood Chain is essentially a contest for traffic.
Pons utilizes transaction fees for repurchase, turning issuance and trading volume into buy pressure for PONS; LONG links stock tokens and Memes together, trying to transform traditional asset price fluctuations into new speculative targets; Pools bets on low fees and Uniswap's distribution capability. While these three mechanisms appear different, they are actually competing for the same batch of users.
The data from the Robinhood Chain has already shown this: as of August 10, approximately 92.9% of accounts have only interacted with Meme coins, while only about 3.7% of accounts have used tokenized stocks. What Robinhood Chain aims to do is on-chain finance, yet the first to gain momentum remains a Meme craze.
This also poses the real risk for tokens like Pons and LONG. Their today's rise is not merely about investors betting on a certain launchpad to win, but on whether Meme trading on the Robinhood Chain can continue to grow. The more tokens are issued and the more frequent trading occurs, the stronger Pons' repurchase mechanism becomes; the more Meme funds enter stock pair trading, the greater the narrative space for LONG.
The question is that these flywheels are currently all built on the same premise: the on-chain speculative heat cannot stop.
The 90-day gas subsidy provided by Robinhood for certain wallets will expire at the end of September. After the subsidy is lifted, how much of the trading volume today, which surged to tens of billions of dollars, will remain? For the launchpads relying on Meme traffic growth, will the fee income quickly fall back? Will those users who entered the Robinhood Chain due to the wealth effect of Pons or LONG actually continue using financial products like lending and tokenized stocks?
This is the true watershed of the launchpad battle.
If the Meme fervor fades and the traffic leaves together, then what Pons, LONG, Pools, and others are competing for today is merely who can grab more chips in a cycle of speculation. But if these platforms can truly retain Meme users and guide them step by step towards lending, tokenized stocks, and other on-chain financial activities, what is at stake now is not just the rise and fall of a platform token, but the control of the next financial entry point of the Robinhood Chain.
*This content is for reference only and does not constitute any investment advice. The market is risky, and investments should be cautious.
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