A memecoin making app becomes crypto’s top fee generators as Robinhood Chain activity explodes
Users paid nearly $6 million in a day to create and trade tokens through Pons, more than they paid to use Pump or Hyperliquid, and even more than they paid to use Robinhood Chain itself.
— Pons generated about $5.95 million in fees over 24 hours, ranking fourth among services tracked by DefiLlama and surpassing the Robinhood Chain on which it operates.
— Nearly 25,000 tokens launched on Pons on Sept. 2 as daily trading volume reached $544 million, while its PONS token surged 300% in a week amid protocol-funded buybacks and burns.
— The memecoin boom helped Robinhood Chain collect about $4 million in a single day, roughly one-fifth of the fees the network has earned since its July launch.
Pons, an app that lets anyone create and trade a token on Robinhood’s new blockchain, generated nearly $6 million in fees over the past 24 hours, vaulting it into the top tier of crypto’s fee-generating protocols as memecoin activity surged across the network.
Users paid about $5.95 million in fees through Pons over the past 24 hours, according to DefiLlama. That ranked Pons fourth by 24-hour fees among protocols tracked by the data provider, behind only Tether, Uniswap and Circle, and above Pump at $4.64 million.
Robinhood Chain itself took about $4 million and perpetuals trading powerhouse Hyperliquid about $2 million, the data shows.
The surge highlights an unexpected source of activity for Robinhood Chain. The network launched in July with tokenized stocks as a flagship product, but memecoins and other user-created tokens are now generating some of its heaviest usage and fee activity.
Nearly 25,000 new tokens were launched through Pons on Sept. 2, up almost 19% from Tuesday, while 24-hour trading volume reached $544 million. Since July, the platform has produced about 646,000 tokens from more than 167,000 unique creator addresses, data show.
Token factory
Pons is essentially a factory for creating a new token that becomes tradable within minutes. A user picks a name and symbol, creates the token through the app for a launch fee of about $1, and a market for buying and selling it opens on Robinhood Chain.
Pons then collects a cut of every trade, with portions going to the protocol and token creators, meaning the economics depend not only on the number of tokens launched but also on how much trading they generate afterward.
The project’s technical documents say it currently uses most of the protocol’s retained funds to buy its own PONS token on the market and destroy it. This mechanism creates recurring buying demand for PONS while reducing supply, likely contributing to the token’s 300% surge over the past week.
Onchain data show that about 293 million PONS, or 29% of the original supply, have already been removed from circulation.
As such, what people are buying with that mechanism is mostly cartoons and trending memes as tokens.
The largest token native to Robinhood Chain is Cash Cat, worth about $254 million, followed by Goose Token at nearly $78 million and Chump Coin at about $30 million, CoinGecko data shows.
However, the entire category of tokens is worth roughly $577 million, meaning a large share of the ecosystem’s value was concentrated in only a handful of names despite hundreds of thousands of launches.
How the frenzy benefits Robinhood
Robinhood launched its network in July with tokenized stocks as one of its flagship products. So far, however, memecoins and other user-created assets have supplied a substantial share of its early activity.
On the company’s second-quarter earnings call, CEO Vlad Tenev said stock tokens were among the products he was “perhaps the most excited about.” But he also acknowledged that outside developers were already using the network in unexpected ways.
“We have gotten a lot of developer activity too,” Tenev said. Developers were building on the network “in ways that we have not thought of.”
Pons now looks like the biggest example of how a third-party memecoin launchpad has become one of crypto’s largest fee generators
Wednesday was the network’s biggest day by a distance. Robinhood Chain took about $4 million in fees over the past 24 hours, bringing the total to nearly $20 million since the network launched in July.
In other words, roughly one-fifth of the chain’s lifetime fee total arrived in a single 24-hour period.
Its analytics dashboard shows the network has retained about $18 million since launch, equivalent to nearly 90 cents of every dollar of fees generated.
That figure, however, should not automatically be treated as Robinhood Markets corporate revenue.
Robinhood has told investors that activity on the chain does generate money for the company, although considerably less than the headline network-fee numbers might suggest.
“On the monetization piece, per transaction, we make a few basis points,” CFO Shiv Verma said on Robinhood’s second-quarter earnings call. “Not per volume, it’s per transaction.” Robinhood shares approximately half of that with Arbitrum, he added.
Pons is independent of Robinhood, but every launch and trade runs across the infrastructure Robinhood operates, which, in turn, makes fees as long as the memecoin frenzy keeps going. The more important metric for Robinhood, therefore, may not be the dollar value of the memecoins being traded but the number of transactions they generate.
What Robinhood did was, by opening the network to outside developers, create the conditions for applications it had not necessarily anticipated would become major drivers of activity.
Robinhood shares closed 3.4% higher at $106.99 on Wednesday and surged 15% on Thursday, outperforming most crypto stocks as bitcoin headed to $80,000. Morgan Stanley upgraded the stock this week, citing growth across the company’s broader product lineup rather than anything specific to the chain.
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