Pons launchpad growth on Robinhood Chain

At ten past four on the afternoon of 28 August, a wallet on Robinhood Chain paid a little gas and made a coin called PDEX. Ten seconds later the coin was finished. In those seconds 68 wallets bought and sold it, the reserve behind it filled to its limit, and the software moved it onto Uniswap on its own. Nobody approved anything. PDEX has traded millions of dollars since, and it is now worth about 8 cents for every dollar the first hour paid.

The thing that made PDEX is called Pons. It is a launchpad: software that turns a name, a ticker and a picture into a coin you can trade, then runs the market for that coin until enough money has arrived to hand it to a real exchange. Anyone can use it, and every launch it has ever made is queryable through the Pons launchpad API.

Bitquery indexes every block on Robinhood Chain, so we read the whole record, from the first coin Pons made to the end of 3 September. This is where those coins went, who paid, who was paid, and what the coins were worth once the software let go of them. One caveat belongs at the front. Bitquery's own decoded trade tables do not list Pons trades until the middle of August, so every figure here was rebuilt from the raw contract logs instead.

A coin costs a few dollars and about a minute

Robinhood Chain is the brokerage's own blockchain. Pons is one of several launchpads running on it, and by the end of August it was the busiest thing on the chain by a distance. The model will be familiar to anyone who has watched pump.fun on Solana, which Bitquery also indexes through its pump.fun API.

A contract mints a billion tokens and sells them along a curve, so the first buyer pays least and every buyer after pays a little more. The money collects in a reserve. When the reserve hits a fixed line the curve shuts itself off and tips everything into a Uniswap pool, where the coin trades like anything else. Pons takes a penny in every dollar of each buy and each sell along the way, plus a smaller charge in the first minutes that fades as the coin ages.

The reserve is where Pons parts company with everything else. On pump.fun a coin is priced in one thing, and that thing is SOL. Pons lets whoever makes the coin choose what backs it, and Robinhood Chain offers a menu of its own tokenized shares to pick from. Other chains carry tokenized equities too, and Solana's have their own trading week. What we have not found anywhere else is a launchpad that will price a new coin against one. A Pons coin can be backed by ether, by a dollar stablecoin, or by a tokenized share of Nvidia.

A joke coin with Nvidia underneath it

More than a third of every coin Pons made is backed by a tokenized stock, a commodity or a wrapped bitcoin rather than by a crypto asset. Nvidia is the most popular, then a SpaceX tracker, then a Trump Media ticker, then the fund that follows the S&P 500. Gold, GameStop, Tesla, Apple, Costco and 28 others are in there too.

Roughly a dollar in every three that moved through a Pons curve was priced in something that tracks a real-world asset, which is a market that did not exist anywhere before this chain shipped tokenized shares.

Nothing much, then everything at once

For three weeks Pons was small. A couple of thousand coins a day, a few million dollars changing hands, nobody paying attention. From 25 August the line goes near vertical. Daily trading on the curves rose about 55 times over in 11 days, and the number of coins made each day went up roughly 17 times. Across its final week the launchpad was turning out a new coin every 4 seconds.

The curves are the smaller half of the business. A coin that graduates keeps trading on Uniswap, and that is where the money actually is: about three dollars traded there for every one traded on a curve. Graduated Pons coins now account for about a quarter of every Uniswap v4 trade on the chain, which shows up in any DEX trade feed for it.

Ten seconds, or never

Making a coin is nearly free, so most coins are worth nothing. One in five never records a single trade, and three in five never find five separate buyers. Fewer than one coin in sixty reaches the line and graduates.

The ones that get there get there fast. Half of all graduations happen within 4 minutes of the coin being made, and five in every six happen inside the first hour. PDEX took ten seconds. This is not a market working out what a coin is worth over days; it is a queue of programs filling a $9,000 bucket as fast as blocks allow. A coin still on its curve after a day almost never finishes.

Who gets paid, and how little

Pons charged a shade over a penny and a half in every dollar traded, taken as a flat cut of each trade plus the fading early charge. The contract publishes its own accounting every time it sweeps that money out. The split favours whoever made the coin, who takes about four dollars in every five, with the rest going to Pons.

That share is generous and mostly worthless, because it was spread across more than a hundred thousand different recipients. The middle one earned $15.73. Barely a dozen people cleared ten thousand dollars in the whole month.

Two thirds go home poorer

More than three hundred thousand separate wallets traded on a Pons curve. Adding up every dollar each one put in and took out, two in every three finished behind. The winners split a third of what the losers gave up. A typical wallet made four trades on a single coin and finished down about five dollars.

The programs do worse than the people. About a thousand wallets made more than a thousand trades each, between them more than a quarter of everything traded, and as a group they are deep in the red. Nine of them look like one owner: almost identical wallets, each trading around three thousand different coins, each spending roughly the same and each losing roughly the same. A program that buys every new coin is buying the coins that never finish, which is almost all of them.

Graduation is usually the top

Reaching Uniswap is the goal, and for almost every coin it is also the high point. Taking the graduated coins with enough trading to price honestly, the middle one now sits 85% below its first hour on the open market. Fewer than one in ten are above where they opened.

A few are real. microduck has traded tens of millions of dollars since it graduated and is worth many times what it opened at, and a handful of others have done something similar. Almost all the value sits in those few, the same distribution a Solana token factory produced when we measured one earlier. The holder registers agree. Setting aside the Uniswap pool contract and the burn address, which any holder query would otherwise count as the whale, the median graduated coin has 74 real holders, and the ten largest of those hold about four fifths of the supply. Two in five have fewer than fifty holders at all.

The coin called PONS did not come from Pons

There is a token called PONS, and the launchpad did not make it. It was deployed three weeks before Pons made its first coin, and it appears nowhere in the register of coins Pons created. It has done well out of the name. Its price rose about eight times over in the 11 days to 3 September, on the same days the launchpad's own volume went vertical, and it turned over more in a single day than most of the coins on this page have managed in total. Just under three in every ten tokens sit in the burn address.

Whether the token and the launchpad are run by the same people is not something the chain answers. Nothing in the factory, the router or the fee contracts refers to it. The two share a name and a price chart, and that is all we can show.