Everyone in crypto is talking about PONS right now, the native token of the Pons app on the buzzy Robinhood Chain — and by far the best performer on the chain.
PONS is the token behind Pons, the largest memecoin factory on Robinhood Chain — a launch platform that lets anyone create a coin built mainly around an internet joke or trend, rather than an actual product. If you already know the Pump.fun app on the Solana network, this will feel very familiar.
The Robinhood Chain token was trading at US$0.5978 on its Uniswap pool on 3 September, above a market value of US$430 million, up 31.82% over 24 hours. For early investors, a US$1,000 bet on 17 July, when PONS hit a low of roughly US$0.0033, would be worth about US$181,000 today.
Pons works like a vending machine for new cryptocurrencies. Anyone can choose a name, a ticker and an image, and the platform deploys a token with a fixed supply of 1 billion directly into a trading pool — no code, no team allocation, no waiting. Pons never touches users' funds; every launch and trade happens through the creator's own wallet.
The platform runs exclusively on Robinhood Chain, a new blockchain network that the trading-app company Robinhood launched on 1 July. It is a layer 2, meaning it processes transactions on its own faster, cheaper infrastructure and settles results back to Ethereum. Robinhood built the chain for tokenised stocks and DeFi apps, but memecoins have driven most of its early traffic.
Pons plays the same role on Robinhood Chain that Pump.fun plays on Solana: the default machine where traders go to launch and bet on new tokens. Pons went live just days after Robinhood Chain's mainnet, absorbing most of the activity after an early rival called Noxa abruptly stopped accepting new launches on 11 July.
PONS itself started trading around 15 July at a fraction of a cent. It bottomed out two days later, then recovered to US$0.066 by 27 July, as Pons became the busiest launch platform on the chain.
That first rally did not survive the competition. In early August, Uniswap — already the default exchange on Robinhood Chain — launched its own launch platform, Pools.trade, charging zero fees and quickly capturing half of all launch-platform volume. The scare sent PONS plunging to around US$0.016.
What brought it back was the tokenomics, not just the buzz around Robinhood Chain and its intense activity. About 80% of Pons's revenue funds an automatic buyback and burn: the platform uses trading fees to buy PONS on the open market and destroy it permanently, shrinking the supply. About 29% of the original 1 billion tokens, roughly 288 million, have already been burned, leaving an effective supply close to 712 million.
PONS surged again in the second half of August, climbing from around US$0.03 to a new record close to US$0.49 in early September.
Along the way, it overtook CashCat — the chain's leading memecoin, named after the “CashCat” brand that Robinhood founders Vlad Tenev and Baiju Bhatt considered before naming their company — to become the largest token on Robinhood Chain by market value.
Tenev also took note of the ecosystem, telling podcaster Graham Stephan on Iced Coffee Hour that on Robinhood Chain, “if you hold a memecoin, you basically get stock tokens via airdrop“.
Binance Wallet added PONS to its Alpha trading tier on 2 September, and the token hit new highs the following day.
The Pons platform recorded US$5.95 million in daily fees on 3 September — enough to rank fourth among all DeFi protocols tracked by DefiLlama and, briefly, to overtake Robinhood Chain itself that day in terms of earnings.
PONS now trades on Uniswap pools on Robinhood Chain, alongside centralised listings on MEXC, Gate.io, KuCoin and Binance Alpha, plus futures on Hyperliquid, Bybit and Aster. Market-value estimates vary by tracker — from US$392 million on DefiLlama to US$576 million on OpenSea — a reminder of how thin and fast-moving the token's on-chain liquidity is.
* Translated and edited with permission from Decrypt.
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