On September 3rd, crypto influencer Rune revealed that Bonk Guy, the top trader on social trading platform Fomo's profit leaderboard, is 64 years old this year. According to Bonk Guy's shared portfolio, he invested approximately $67,000 to buy PONS, the native token of the Robinhood Chain launchpad Pons, and has seen a paper gain of nearly 9100%. Behind this position lies a launchpad battle on Robinhood Chain over the past period.
The 64-Year-Old Hunter
Three years ago, Bonk Guy (@theunipcs) used $16,000 in capital and 6x leverage to long BONK, once achieving eight-figure floating profits, before being fully liquidated during the black swan market in October last year. This time, he reappears at the top of the profit leaderboard thanks to a batch of tokens on Robinhood Chain: PONS, USELESS, Marscoin. His publicly disclosed cumulative spot trading profits had surpassed $10 million by late August, with profits exceeding $5.7 million in the past 30 days. The total value of his account holdings once surged to $15.74 million.
His 9100% gain came from riding a self-reinforcing pricing mechanism on Robinhood Chain – PONS. How this mechanism operates determined how much he could earn, and also dictates the direction of this launchpad war.
Pons
Pons is operated by Pons Labs. Each new token on its platform has a fixed supply of 1 billion tokens, with a creation cost of only 0.0005 ETH. The trading fee is 1%, of which 70% goes to the token creator and 30% goes to the protocol. Of the portion the protocol receives, 80% is used to buy back and burn PONS on the secondary market, with the remaining 20% reserved for team operations. This design links the "frequency of new token issuance and trading" with the "PONS buyback and burn": the more new tokens created and the more active the trading, the more fees generated, with a portion continuously converted into market buy-side pressure and the burn of PONS, directly binding platform trading activity with PONS's supply-demand dynamics.
Leveraging this mechanism, Pons captured the largest wave of traffic after NOXA, the pioneering platform, paused token creation in mid-July, and has since continued to expand its share. By early September, its token creation volume accounted for about 66% of the chain's total, and the trading volume from tokens newly issued via Pons constituted about 78% of the chain's new token trading volume. On September 3rd, Pons' daily protocol fees surpassed Pump.fun, exceeding $6 million, and its PONS token valuation subsequently reached a historical high of approximately $970 million, with weekly gains exceeding 200%. Currently, about 29% of the total supply has been bought back and burned. After launching V2 in August, new tokens upon completing the graduation phase can also be paired for trading with tokenized stocks like Nvidia, Apple, and Robinhood.
LONG
If the core of Pons is cash flow buybacks, LONG's initial bet was on narrative—bundling tokenized stocks and memes directly into one product. LongX, launched in early September, packages a 3x leveraged position in Nvidia stock into a token and opens trading pairs with meme tokens. Artificial Inu, the highest market cap meme token on the LONG platform, is paired with the Nvidia stock token and once reached a market cap exceeding $200 million, with gains far outstripping the spot price of Nvidia stock during the same period. Considering it inherently combines leveraged stock exposure with meme trading attributes, its price is clearly not solely following the underlying stock but is also influenced by the leverage mechanism and on-chain speculative sentiment. LONG also designed a "community mode": a portion of fees is automatically burned, and another portion is locked in a treasury, attempting to use the logic of capital lock-up to make stock-paired memes its differentiated tag. Currently, on the LONG platform, meme tokens paired with Costco, Micron, SpaceX, etc., have also reached market caps in the tens of millions, vying for the second position within the platform.
Pools
In early August, Uniswap Labs directly launched its launchpad on Robinhood Chain. On the day Pools went live, founder Hayden Adams publicly referred to high-fee launchpads on the market as "predatory," implicitly targeting platforms like Pons with their 1% fee model. Pools adopted the opposite approach: a trading fee of only 0.25%, with creators able to take 0.05% of that, and the remainder automatically reinvested into a permanently locked liquidity pool, with no additional launchpad fees charged. Tokens are immediately accessible via Uniswap's web interface, wallet, routing API, and third-party integrations like MetaMask and Ledger, meaning a token becomes visible to the entire Uniswap ecosystem upon launch. On its first day, Pools, leveraging official trust and distribution channels, temporarily captured 40-50% of the chain's token creation and trading volume, posing a substantial challenge to Pons' leading position. While Pons relies on first-mover advantage and the buyback mechanism to build user stickiness, Pools bets on the reputation of its DeFi team and lower fees. These two approaches are still in direct competition.
Besides these three, Robinhood Chain also hosts over a dozen other active launchpads like PAIR focusing on stock basket pairing, CLUTCH with a community+NFT direction, Pools fun in collaboration with Sushi, and developer-oriented Hood Dev, each occupying different niche directions.
If You Can't Beat 'Em, Join 'Em?
In early August, Pools temporarily captured 40-50% of the chain's token creation and trading volume on its launch day, coming on strong. But this advantage wasn't sustained. By early September, Pons had regained its lead, accounting for about 66% of token creation volume and about 78% of new token trading volume. Pools' low fees and official distribution channels ultimately failed to truly shake Pons' leading position.
What's more interesting is that before the competitive relationship concluded, Uniswap Labs' role underwent a change first.
On September 4th, Uniswap Labs announced the purchase of PONS, with specific amounts and holding ratios undisclosed. Following the announcement, PONS rose approximately 40% within hours.
On one hand, its own Pools is competing with Pons for the launchpad gateway on Robinhood Chain; on the other hand, Uniswap Labs has become an investor in PONS.
Thus, the market began interpreting this investment as a dramatic statement: If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. However, what Uniswap Labs might be eyeing isn't just Pons as a competitor, but rather the complete flywheel formed on Robinhood Chain encompassing launch, trading, fees, and platform token value capture. Pools can continue competing for the token launch gateway, while PONS allows Uniswap Labs to simultaneously bet on the chain's currently most successful traffic aggregation point.
The Deadline Behind the Hype
The launchpad war on Robinhood Chain is essentially a battle for traffic.
Pons uses fee buybacks, turning token launches and trading volume into buy-side pressure for PONS. LONG bundles tokenized stocks with memes, attempting to turn price volatility of traditional assets into a new speculative target. Pools bets on low fees and Uniswap's distribution power. The three mechanisms appear different, but are currently vying for the same user base.
Data from Robinhood Chain illustrates this: As of August 10th, approximately 92.9% of accounts had only interacted with meme tokens, while accounts that had only used tokenized stocks accounted for merely about 3.7%. What Robinhood Chain aims for is on-chain finance, but what initially took off is still a meme frenzy.
This is also the real risk for platform tokens like PONS and LONG. Their current rise isn't merely investors betting on one launchpad winning, but betting that meme trading on Robinhood Chain can continue to grow. The more tokens launched and the more frequent the trading, the stronger Pons' fee buyback mechanism becomes; the more meme capital enters stock-paired trading, the larger LONG's narrative space grows.
The issue is, all these flywheels are currently built on the same premise: on-chain speculative heat cannot stop.
Robinhood's Gas fee subsidy for some wallets for the first 90 days will expire at the end of September. After the subsidy ends, how much of today's billions in DEX trading volume will remain? For launchpads relying on meme traffic growth, will fee income rapidly decline? Will users drawn to Robinhood Chain by the wealth effects of Pons, LONG, etc., actually stay to use lending, tokenized stocks, and other financial products?
This is the real watershed moment for this launchpad war.
If the meme hype fades and the traffic leaves with it, then what Pons, LONG, Pools, and others are fighting over today is merely who gets a larger share of the chips in one speculative cycle. But if these platforms can truly retain meme users and gradually guide them towards lending, tokenized stocks, and other on-chain financial services, then what's at stake now isn't the rise and fall of a platform token, but control over the next gateway to finance on Robinhood Chain.
*This content is for informational purposes only and does not constitute any investment advice. The market carries risks, and investment requires caution.
