A wave of launchpads on Robinhood Chain slashed pump.fun’s share of the token-launch market in the first half of July. Four weeks later, pump.fun was back above 50% of weekly category fees and earning more per week than it did before those rivals showed up.
According to The Defiant, the launchpad business itself expanded faster than pump.fun lost share. Weekly fees across the launchpads tracked by DefiLlama rose from about $7 million in late June to roughly $18 million by mid-July and stayed around that level, while pump.fun’s own weekly fees climbed to a 90-day high. The memecoin-related growth came almost entirely from Robinhood Chain, whose public mainnet opened six weeks earlier, though that surge has since started to fade.
Launchpad fees jumped 77% over 30 days
Launchpads collected $75.39 million in fees in the 30 days through Aug. 11, up from $42.53 million in the prior 30-day window from June 13 to July 12, based on The Defiant’s calculations from DefiLlama daily fee data. The comparison covers all 125 launchpads for which DefiLlama reports fees.
Pump.fun accounted for $31.83 million of the July 13 to Aug. 11 total, compared with $24.45 million in the June 13 to July 12 period, a 30% increase. Its category share, however, fell to 42.2% from 57.5%.
The weekly figures show the swing more clearly. In the week ended June 30, pump.fun took $5.63 million out of the category’s $7.10 million, or 79.4%. In the week ended July 14, it brought in $5 million out of $18.71 million, leaving it with just 26.7%. By the week ended Aug. 11, pump.fun had climbed to $9.21 million out of $17.83 million, or 51.7%, marking its biggest weekly haul in 90 days.
NOXA was the first product behind the July drop in share
The Defiant said two products drove pump.fun’s July collapse in market share. The first was NOXA, a launchpad and DEX that reached Robinhood Chain before the chain’s public rollout.
Its Robinhood Chain factory went live on June 16, two weeks before the chain’s public mainnet. Through the end of June, it generated anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars per day. Fees crossed $99,000 on July 1, ran between $24,000 and $71,000 over the next week, then jumped to $2.22 million on July 8. They peaked at $2.33 million on July 11.
NOXA charged a 1% swap fee, implying about $233 million of trading volume in a single day on a chain that was then only 10 days old.
That same day, NOXA turned off its own launchpad and said the reason was overuse. Robinhood Chain’s Blockscout explorer shows that nine seconds after the last token launched through the platform, the deployer wallet dev.noxa.eth called setLaunchEnabled(false) on the launch factory. Roughly a minute later, the project account wrote, 「you folks have been vocal about the constant new token spam, vamps, and we identified some bots spamming and copying new tokens every hour.」 It described the move as temporary, adding, 「we are finding a workaround for this issue and we have decided to temporarily disable new launches while we work.」
Every launch attempt since then has reverted.
Pons emerged after NOXA halted launches
The second key product was Pons. Developer Ozzy, who posts as @MEADGod, deployed its first factory on July 13, two days after NOXA stopped accepting launches. Ten minutes before the second deployment, he wrote, 「I built a launchpad for Robinhood Chain because the existing ones were extracting without taking care of their communities.」
Pons charges the same 1% pool fee that NOXA used, plus a 0.0005 ETH launch fee. According to its documentation, tokens launched through the current factory split the pool fee 70% to the creator and 30% to the protocol. The first 11 hours of launches on the original factory kept a 90/10 split in the creator’s favor. Eighty percent of the protocol’s share is used for PONS buybacks and burns.
Across its two versions, Pons generated $19.80 million in fees over 30 days, more than every launchpad except pump.fun.
Pons V1 peaked in July, V2 introduced new fee mechanics
The first version of Pons peaked at $1.54 million in daily fees on July 21 and had fallen to about $340,000 by Aug. 11, a 78% decline. DefiLlama data cited by The Defiant shows that version has produced $18.89 million in all-time fees and $5.03 million in protocol revenue.
Ozzy deployed a second version on Aug. 3, and it began recording fees the next day. Contract reads against PonsV2LaunchFactory return a 1% curve fee, a 1% post-graduation fee, a 30% protocol share, an optional creator tax capped at 10%, and a 99% opening buy tax that decays over three seconds. Version two uses 50% of the creator’s residual buying power to buy back the launched token rather than PONS, and what it buys vests over five years instead of being burned. It recorded about $148,000 in fees on Aug. 12.
Uniswap entered with Pools and no launchpad fee
Uniswap Labs launched pools.trade on Aug. 5 on the same chain with no launchpad fee at all. Each token opens a Uniswap v4 pool with a 0.25% LP fee that auto-compounds into a position the creator cannot withdraw from. Creators can switch on a cut of 0.05% out of those 25 basis points. In its announcement, Uniswap described that as 「a fraction of the standard ~1% on other launchpads.」
The fee schedule it was implicitly comparing itself with is pump.fun’s own: 1.25% on the bonding curve, split 0.95% to the protocol and 0.300% to the creator. Creating a coin is free. Graduating one to PumpSwap costs 0.015 SOL, after which a tiered fee schedule applies and total fees drop as the token’s market capitalization rises.
Pools generated $266,668 in fees on launch day, its highest daily figure so far. By Aug. 11 that had fallen to $36,390, down 86%. Its 30-day total stands at $806,000, versus $19.80 million for Pons. On Aug. 11 alone, Pons V1 produced $343,432, nine times the Pools figure.
DefiLlama has tracked fees for the Pools contracts since July 31, five days before the interface opened. The Defiant previously reported that Pools out-launched Pons on its first day with 10,506 tokens versus 7,210, and that its flagship token, FRONG, was minted six days before the product went live.
PONS has risen 160% over the past week. CoinGecko data cited by The Defiant shows it traded at $0.05072 at 17:20 UTC on Aug. 12, with a market capitalization of $36.9 million, up 19.3% over 24 hours and still 23.6% below its July 27 record. UNI traded at $3.52, down 14.5% on the week.
Four days before launching a competing product on Robinhood Chain, Uniswap’s account replied to Pons with 「Powered by Uniswap」. Neither Ozzy nor the Pons account has posted about pools.trade.
Solana rivals to pump.fun mostly shrank
Launchpads on Solana that compete with pump.fun are now smaller than they were a month earlier. User-paid trading fees fell 65% on Bags, 56% on Meteora’s Dynamic Bonding Curve, 44% on BONK.fun, and 85% on EasyA Kickstart. Four.meme on BNB Chain fell 23%.
The same declines show up almost point-for-point when measured by protocol revenue instead, and SOL and BNB were flat across the two comparison windows. The Defiant said that means the drop reflects weaker activity rather than token price changes.
Launch counts fell too. Dune data published by The Block shows that over the 30 days through Aug. 10, Bags created 923 tokens, down 78.5%; LetsBonk created 4,039, down 34.3%; and Jupiter Studio created 347, down 45.5%. Pump.fun, by contrast, created 872,202 tokens, up 3%, and accounted for 99.3% of all tokens launched on Solana.
Growth outside pump.fun came mostly from chains where pump.fun does not operate. Flap.sh on BNB Chain grew 209% to $5.51 million. o1 Launchpad, which runs mostly on Base, rose from $12,698 to $982,481 after its July 3 debut. The four biggest new entrants in the period — Pons, StonkBrokers, LetsCash and Uniswap Pools — all launched on Robinhood Chain.
Robinhood Chain nearly matched Solana, then cooled
Over the 30 days through Aug. 11, launchpad fees on Solana totaled $33.61 million, while Robinhood Chain posted $33.49 million. Solana grew 18% versus the prior 30-day period. Robinhood Chain grew 236% from $9.97 million in the prior 30 days, which was also its first month. BNB Chain produced $6.62 million, up 88%, while Base reached $1.44 million.
On a weekly basis, Robinhood Chain’s launchpad fees peaked at $11.95 million in the week ended July 14 and then dropped to $7.07 million in the week ended Aug. 11. Solana reached $9.59 million, its highest point in the 90-day window. On the narrow question of which chain is capturing more money from token launches, Solana is ahead again.
DefiLlama data cited by The Defiant shows Robinhood Chain generated $100.2 million in application fees over 30 days, versus Solana’s $233 million and Base’s $39.6 million. Over the 30 days through Aug. 12, Robinhood Chain posted $16.58 billion in DEX volume, up from $4.49 billion in the previous month. Solana did $46.41 billion over the same span, down 25%. The Defiant had reported in July that Robinhood Chain overtook Base on daily active users three weeks after launch.
The next fight on Solana is for trading, not minting
One of the fastest-growing challengers for pump.fun users on Solana does not launch tokens at all. FOMO, a social trading app built by FOMO Labs, generated $9.76 million in fees over the 30 days through Aug. 11, up 172% from $3.58 million in the prior 30-day period.
Its revenue over the seven days through Aug. 11 reached $3.01 million, more than double the $1.34 million it made in the week through July 11, and above Phantom’s $1.51 million and Jupiter’s $0.96 million over the same week. Its daily revenue record of $544,444 was set on Aug. 6.
According to its terms of service, FOMO charges 「a minimum fee of 0.50% per transaction (subject to a minimum fee of $0.95 per transaction).」 It offers copy trading, a leaderboard and Apple Pay onboarding. The company raised a $75 million Series B led by Index Ventures in June and says more than 625,000 people have joined and traded over $4 billion. It has no token and no launchpad.
The Defiant said pump.fun’s competition on Solana now centers on trading rather than minting. Pump.fun has responded by broadening its own app. On July 8, it added support for trading Robinhood Chain tokens inside the pump.fun app without bridging. The Defiant had earlier covered that feature as part of CASHCAT trading buildout. Co-founder Alon Cohen, who posts as @a1lon9, wrote, 「the pump fun app is not just for pump fun coins, it covers all of your crosschain trading.」
Graduation rates improved, but memecoin prices did not recover
Dune data published by The Block shows that the share of pump.fun tokens graduating from the bonding curve averaged 2.82% in the first 11 days of August and 2.55% in July, up from 0.86% in June and 0.62% in September 2025. Launch counts also rose over that stretch, ruling out a shrinking denominator as the explanation.
Since March 2024, pump.fun has generated $1.17 billion in fees and $1.083 billion in revenue. In April, it committed half of revenue for one year to buying back and burning PUMP, after burning roughly $370 million of previously repurchased tokens, about 36% of circulating supply at the time. DefiLlama attributed $17.9 million in revenue to token holders over the past 30 days.
That expansion in launch activity has not lifted memecoin prices across the board. CoinGecko data cited by The Defiant puts the memecoin sector at $25.15 billion on Aug. 12, equal to 1.11% of the $2.27 trillion crypto market. CoinGecko’s own research places the sector peak at $150.6 billion in December 2024, leaving it 83% below that level.
Using CoinGecko market-cap history for the 16 largest constituents, which together account for 80% of the category’s value, The Defiant calculated that the sector was roughly flat over 30 days and down about one-third over 90 days.
Among the 20 largest memecoins excluding wrapped duplicates, only seven were higher over 30 days. BONK was down 42%, SPX6900 15%, FLOKI 7%, TRUMP 7%, WIF 7%, FARTCOIN 6% and DOGE 2%. Across the 5,774 memecoins with a quoted market capitalization on CoinGecko, 34% were higher than a month earlier, while the median token sat 99% below its all-time high, according to The Defiant’s count.
The exception was PUMP. CoinGecko data shows the token rose 83% over 30 days to $0.00273 with a $1.07 billion market capitalization, though it remained 69% below its September 2025 high. PUMP is the token tied to the business at the center of this story, and its buybacks are funded by that business’s revenue.
The launchpad business is larger, monetizes better, and has become more crowded since June. The memecoin sector those products feed into is still worth 83% less than it was at its peak.