Written by: Cathy

In the summer of 2017, a new species emerged on Ethereum: by writing a smart contract and drafting a white paper, one could raise over a hundred million dollars from around the world. That was called an ICO.

Thousands of projects were launched, and the vast majority returned to zero. But the platforms and the delegated investments that made money along the way thrived.

Later came IEO, where exchanges helped filter projects and allocate quotas. Then later, IDO moved on-chain but still required a large sum of money to build liquidity pools. The gameplay changed again, with inscriptions not fundraising but operating on a first-come, first-served basis.

Each generation lowered the threshold. Each generation ignited a frenzy. The money made by platforms in between often exceeded that of the project parties.

By 2026, the joint curve Meme launch platform cut the threshold to zero. Anyone could launch a token with just a few clicks of a mouse, requiring no seed capital, no review, and no code.

But the hottest battlefield this round was not in Solana.

It was a new chain that launched on July 1, which accumulated $34.6 billion in DEX trading volume over two months; its on-chain Meme launch platform's daily expenses peaked at $6.33 million, repeatedly overshadowing the leader Pump.fun.

It is called Robinhood Chain.

01 Two Months, From Zero to Daily Expenses of $6.33 Million

Robinhood Chain is based on the Arbitrum Orbit architecture, with L2 having extremely low Gas, and its own wallet users enjoying 90 days of Gas subsidies. Trading friction is almost zero, and the Meme launch platform is growing wildly.

The top competitor Pons launched on July 13. The model is simple and crude: it charges a 1% transaction fee, and 70% is returned directly to the token creators, with the protocol keeping only 30%. Of the money left, 80% is used to buy back and destroy the platform's token Pons.

In less than two months, 30% of the total supply entered a black hole address, approximately 300 million tokens. Pons rose from zero to nearly $1, with a market value that once exceeded $600 million.

From its launch to becoming the fourth-highest ranked protocol in network fees, Pons took less than 50 days. Pump.fun took over two years to reach a similar position.

On September 3, Pons' daily protocol fees exceeded $6 million, ranking fourth in the entire network, only behind Tether, Uniswap, and Circle. Pump.fun was left far behind. On September 2, Robinhood Chain's daily income reached $4.01 million, while Solana's total chain income that same day was only $81,700.

Robinhood Chain is not just about Pons.

A Meme launch platform called LONG did something bolder: it did not allow new tokens to pair with ETH but instead formed liquidity paired with stocks like NVIDIA and the S&P 500. Memes and stocks, the on-chain casino and Wall Street intersect here.

LONG's tokenized stocks once had a daily trading volume that exceeded $425 million, accounting for 20% of the total locked value of stocks across the chain. It even packaged stock tokens with 3x leverage, bringing traditional financial derivatives to a two-month-old chain.

The entire chain launched over 190 kinds of stock tokens, with daily DEX trading volume peaking at $3.7 billion, edging close to Solana. From memes to stocks, Robinhood Chain has grown into an on-chain trading market for hybrid assets.

Pons' V2 upgrade locks liquidity after the token graduates in Uniswap V4 pools. Interestingly, the Pools.trade launched by Uniswap later ran on the same underlying liquidity. Whichever front end wins, the funds ultimately settle in Uniswap's pools.

But all of this is based on one premise: this chain is only two months old.

The Gas on L2 is already low enough to be negligible; creators can self-trade at extremely low cost, paying 1% to get back 70%. How much of that enormous trading volume is actual demand?

The answer is still unclear.

02 Everyone is Competing to Issue Tokens

The explosion of Robinhood Chain is just one aspect of the war.

On Solana, Pump.fun remains the Meme launch platform with the highest accumulated revenue, taking over $1.23 billion. Its moat is a closed loop: after tokens graduate, they enter the self-built PumpSwap for trading, allowing for commission extraction throughout the entire lifecycle. But its daily fees have been surpassed multiple times by Pons.

Pump.fun is also not idle. It launched Mayhem Mode, introducing AI trading agents to fight against sniping bots, protecting retail investors from being front-run. 50% of PumpSwap's protocol income is shared with creators.

It is not just Pons that challenges it.

LetsBONK.fun introduced a dynamic logarithmic pricing curve on Solana, lowering the early price slope to give retail investors a fairer price in the first few minutes of trading. Each wallet is limited to a purchase within the first 60 seconds, specifically targeting sniping bots. Its market share on Solana's Meme launch platform soared from 13% to 78%. About 50% of the platform fees are returned to BONK holders through buybacks and burns.

Raydium is also on the move. Tokens that originally graduated from Pump.fun automatically entered Raydium's pools, contributing transaction fees on every subsequent trade. Once PumpSwap launched, this financial avenue was cut off. Raydium directly launched LaunchLab to counter it.

On the Base chain, Zora turned token issuance into a creator tool. Each creator has an exclusive token, with a total of 1 billion tokens, half going to liquidity pools and half unlocking over five years for the creator themselves.

On July 30, the number of newly issued tokens on Zora accounted for 44.6% of all chains in the network, helping Base surpass Solana in token issuance for the first time. Over $27 million has been allocated to creators, and Zora's token has risen 8-fold in the same period.

Believe has gone even wilder. By replying to a designated account on X and attaching the token name, deployment on-chain is automatically completed in the background. The V2 version launched a "Human Emotion Market," allowing tokens to long and short personal reputations. Issuing tokens is not just about issuing tokens; it has become a form of social priming.

Meanwhile, within Robinhood Chain, Uniswap personally launched Pools.trade, with zero issuance fees and zero transaction cuts. Only a 0.25% LP fee is compounded automatically, locking up funds and raising the price floor of tokens with each trade.

On the first day of launch, $73.6 million in trading volume flooded in, exceeding that of Uniswap V4 on Ethereum's mainnet on the same day. Pons plummeted 49% within a week.

Every public chain is replaying the same script: first one dominates, then low-cost competitors flood in, and the rates keep being slashed lower. Pump.fun dominated for two years on Solana, now being squeezed by BONK.fun and LaunchLab. Pons has only been steady on Robinhood Chain for two months, and Pools.trade is now coming in with zero rates to snatch users.

The right to issue tokens is becoming a free public infrastructure.

03 Platform Tokens: The Biggest Bet, The Biggest Risk

Almost all Meme launch platforms have issued their own tokens. Almost all are using "buyback and burn" to support prices.

Pons burned 30% of its token supply. Zora's token rose 800% in July. Virtuals continues to buy back and burn tokens with protocol income, but its 18,000 AI agents’ reasoning engines run on its own servers, and if they crash, it all goes down. Clanker uses 60% of its income for buybacks.

The price of these tokens is essentially tied to one thing: how much transaction fees the platform can continuously generate.

The greater risk comes from compliance. The mechanism of continuously returning platform profits to token holders, from the perspective of U.S. securities law, is just one step away from "disguised dividends." The SEC proposed a 400-page "Cryptocurrency Asset Regulation" in August 2026, which for the first time qualitatively defined the lifecycle of tokens at the federal level.

There is a "safe harbor" mechanism in the regulation: if the project can prove that the network has become decentralized and that the founders are no longer the decisive factor of value, the token can shift from being a security to a commodity. The problem is, which of these Meme launch platforms can dare to say they are decentralized?

Platform tokens represent the greatest leverage and the greatest risk exposure in this cycle. Investing in platform tokens is essentially betting that the platform can survive the next winter.

This chain has been live for only two months, and its daily fees are already in the top four across the network.

But every Meme frenzy on public chains has had equally dazzling beginnings. The real test has never been who rises fastest, but who remains after the tide goes out.

The right to issue tokens has become free, but surviving will come at a cost.