Robinhood Chain data has fully receded, PONS market value has dropped by over 60%, and on-chain activity has cooled.

Written by: Nicky, Foresight News

The hype around Robinhood Chain has begun to ebb.

On October 1, Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev stated in an interview with The Rollup that Robinhood Chain will not deliberately choose or support specific winners, aiming to maintain platform neutrality and minimize fees to continue attracting more users and developers. This has greatly dashed community expectations for the project to receive official support from Robinhood.

Significant decline in market value and platform revenue

According to GMGN data, PONS market value has continuously pulled back since reaching an all-time high of approximately $990 million on September 5, now reported at about $366 million, a decrease of 63%. Meanwhile, the market value of the first token AI on the RWA liquidity and token launch platform LONG has dropped from approximately $457 million on September 17 to about $86 million, a decline of about 81%.

The drop in token prices is not an isolated phenomenon. According to DefiLlama data, Robinhood Chain's DEX Volume hit an all-time high of $3.51 billion on September 4 before starting to decline, currently around $1.21 billion within 24 hours, a drop of 65.5%.

Correspondingly, there has been a sharp contraction in platform revenue. According to DefiLlama data, the revenue of the token issuance platform PONs has fallen below $80,000 in the last 24 hours, currently around $72,000, ranking fourth in revenue among Robinhood Chain’s ecological protocols, below Lighter's $97,000, Arcus's $89,000, and Uniswap's $88,000. Pons revenue had exceeded $2 million on September 5, now showing a decline of 96%.

Community analysis links the abrupt fall in Pons revenue to issues with the buyback and burn mechanism's cadence. On October 3, crypto analyst yyy pointed out that Pons had not replenished funds to the buyback allocator for over five days, with about $440,000 awaiting withdrawal in the custody account, believing that delayed fund claims have led to a lower burn rate of PONS recently.

On the same day, Pons founder Ozzy responded that the burn rate has not yet adjusted, and the Claim process remains not fully decentralized, with the team conducting an upgrade of the on-chain contract. The new buyback mechanism is planned to execute a Claim every 7 days, followed by using all claimed funds for buyback and destruction of PONS within the next 7 days. According to the official Pons announcement on October 6, 32% of the total supply of PONS has now been destroyed, with 80% of platform revenue dedicated to accumulating PONS tokens.

While prices and revenues have receded, PONS’s advancement on the exchange level has not stopped. On October 8, Coinbase launched PONS spot trading, Upbit launched PONS trading pairs with KRW, BTC, and USDT, and Bithumb launched PONS KRW trading pairs. However, the liquidity improvement brought by exchanges has yet to be reflected in prices.

Rugs and stock reductions compound, market sentiment declines sharply

On-chain risk events have also exacerbated the weakening of market sentiment. On September 28, on-chain analyst Wazz revealed a series of continuous Rug Pulls and cash-out scams he discovered on Robinhood Chain, with the same gang linked to 53 token issuances over two months, cashing out approximately $18.43 million, with the actual scale potentially larger. Most tokens were issued through Pons V2, attacking more than 70% of the supply after issuance, bundled with approximately 70 to 200 wallets.

On the same day, the GoPlus security team announced the discovery of a high-risk fraudulent meme factory on Robinhood Chain, involving hundreds of meme tokens and over $9 million in transaction volume in the past 30 days, using methods similar to those revealed by Wazz, extensively utilizing Pons V2 for token issuance.

Executives and institutions further dampened market confidence through stock reductions of HOOD. According to US SEC Form 4 documents, on October 5, Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev sold 375,000 shares of company stock, amounting to $42.6435 million, at an average price of about $113.72; Chief Legal Officer Daniel Martin Gallagher Jr. sold 10,000 shares, amounting to $1.1371 million. Both transactions were part of a pre-set Rule 10b5-1 plan. On October 8, Cathie Wood’s ARK Invest sold 151,903 shares of Robinhood stock through the ARKK ETF, valued at $16.6 million. According to Bitget market data, following a per-share high of $127.42 on September 7, HOOD has receded and is currently reported at $108.8, a decline of about 14.6%.

It is noteworthy that on September 29, Robinhood hosted the HOOD Summit, where a series of new products aimed at active traders were launched, including AI trading agents, 10x leveraged cryptocurrency perpetual contracts, and weekend trading for certain US stocks and ETFs. However, there was almost no mention of Robinhood Chain-related content; during the main stage, Pons-related content briefly appeared on the big screen, leading the community to interpret it as official promotion of Pons. However, the continued data decline afterwards indicates that the exposure on the screen did not translate into sustained trading enthusiasm.

Despite the comprehensive drop in short-term data, Robinhood Chain's TVL has not decreased and remains steadily increasing. According to DefiLlama data, the current TVL is approximately $1.033 billion.

Outlook

The official narrative has not regarded the decline in hype as a strategic turning point. On October 9, Robinhood Crypto announced that it is exploring the launch of stock tokens linked to actively managed ETFs on Robinhood Chain, in collaboration with T. Rowe Price, which manages assets worth $1.9 trillion. The statement emphasized that it is still in the exploration stage, and any potential products must go through legal due diligence, obtain approval from the issuer's board, publish final terms, and secure regulatory approval from relevant jurisdictions.

Well-known trader Bonk Guy provided a relatively positive assessment in a post on October 3. He believes that the core advantage of the Robinhood Chain ecosystem is not the technology itself but the large retail user base of Robinhood and the distribution capability brought by ecological tokens, both of which are expected to form a growth flywheel. He attributed the recent weakening to the excessive prior surge in ecological tokens, the diversion of funds due to a recovery in Solana's market, and Robinhood's insufficient progress on ecological projects such as PONS and AI. However, he remains optimistic about this ecosystem, believing that the lack of a clear collapse after the HOOD Summit is a positive signal, and if Robinhood increases its efforts on ecological tokens, on-chain activity is expected to recover.

From a longer-term perspective, the short-term decrease in hype around Robinhood Chain does not contradict the official long-term path planning. The Robinhood Chain mainnet is set to launch on July 1, 2026, with early trading volume and revenue primarily driven by meme and token issuance platforms. Since September, chain revenue has fallen over 90% from its peak, and active addresses have significantly contracted from their peak.

However, official statements have consistently pointed toward tokenizing US assets and global distribution, rather than recreating a universal meme chain. The next phase of evolution includes expanding the number of stock tokens from around 200 to thousands, incorporating private equity and actively managed products, addressing physical redemptions and voting rights, making RWA into a composable financial Lego using perpetual and collateralized loans, and integrating external liquidity using intent layers like NEAR Intents.

At the same time, there are two structural limitations. Robinhood Chain lacks a native on-chain token, using ETH for gas, and the ordering is run by Robinhood. On-chain fees and meme transactions will not directly accumulate into a tradable on-chain asset, and external purchases are still HOOD stock. Official documentation also states that stock tokens are tokenized debt securities issued by Robinhood Assets (Jersey) Limited and cannot be sold to US persons or within the US, with restrictions also applied in Canada, the UK, Switzerland, and other regions. This means that Robinhood's largest users currently cannot directly trade this batch of assets, and a layer of regulatory separation still exists between global distribution and domestic users.

The most recent official checkpoint is the third quarter financial report after the US stock market closes on October 27. Robinhood has announced it will release its third-quarter results for 2026 on that day and hold a video conference call. The launch of the mainnet, stock tokens entering DeFi, the HOOD Summit, and the trading downturn in September all fall within this quarter. The market will primarily focus on whether the management will separately list on-chain trading volume, the asset scale of stock tokens, as well as the timeline for redemptions, voting rights, and actively managed ETF tokens. If the conference call only discusses app-related AI agents, perpetual contracts, and weekend trading, the disconnect between on-chain hype and the company's main narrative will continue.