Pump.fun lost a large slice of the token-launch market in early July as a wave of launchpads on Robinhood Chain, led by NOXA and later Pons, pulled its weekly share down to 26.7%. Four weeks later, that share had climbed back above 50%, with pump.fun posting a 90-day high of $9.21 million in weekly fees for the week ended Aug. 11. The broader launchpad market expanded even faster than pump.fun lost ground, with total fees across 125 launchpads rising 77% to $75.39 million in the 30 days through Aug. 11, according to The Defiant’s calculations using DefiLlama data. Much of that growth came from Robinhood Chain, whose launchpad fees nearly matched Solana over the same 30-day window before cooling on a weekly basis. Pons became the largest new challenger, generating $19.80 million in 30-day fees across two versions, while Uniswap Labs entered the chain with pools.trade and a zero launchpad-fee model. Even so, the surge in launchpad activity has not translated into a broad recovery in memecoin prices: CoinGecko data cited by The Defiant shows the sector remains 83% below its December 2024 peak.

PONS, a token tied to the Robinhood ecosystem, surged on July 21 and briefly pushed its market capitalization above $39 million before pulling back to $28 million, according to GMGN data cited by BlockBeats. The token still held a 24-hour gain of 39%, with trading volume at roughly $13.6 million. Market attention centered on Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev, who followed PONS founder MEADGod earlier in the day. That move came as traders focused on rising competition around Circus Trade, a new meme launch platform in the Bonk ecosystem. BlockBeats said PONS, one of the tokens associated with the native launch platform Pons, broke above its previous high after capital returned to the trade. The report also said the Robinhood market has recently been pricing in on-chain infrastructure and utility-focused tokens. BlockBeats added a risk note, saying on-chain token trading can be highly volatile and is often driven by market sentiment and narrative speculation rather than real value or practical use cases.

Robinhood co-founder and CEO Vlad Tenev has followed Pons founder @MEADGod on X, days after also following Ogle, a World Liberty Financial adviser active around the Pons ecosystem. The social signal has pushed fresh attention toward Pons, a Robinhood Chain launchpad that has been live for only about a week but has already posted rapid gains in token launches and trading activity. According to Dune data cited in the report, Pons had processed more than 66,000 token launches and over $380 million in cumulative trading volume as of 16:00 on July 20, while its share of launchpad token trading volume stayed above 50% over the previous two days. The platform had also distributed about $3.56 million in fees to token creators. Even so, the article argues that Pons still has to show it can convert issuance volume into durable wealth effects. Of roughly 67,000 tokens launched so far, only 529 had reached the platform’s default 4.2 ETH “graduation” threshold at the time of writing, putting the graduation rate below 0.8%.