Pons arbitrage booked $2.48M on Robinhood Chain

01 · The marketHalf a million launches made a new DEX hunt

Pons turns one wallet call into a new coin and a bonding curve. Buyers trade on that curve until the coin has enough backing to move into a public DEX pool. Our first Pons study found a cheap launch loop that was making coins by the thousand.

The next phase starts after a coin leaves its curve. The same token can trade in several pools, each with its own price. A bot can buy from the cheaper pool and sell into the higher-priced one in the same tx. We call the amount left inside the swaps the swap surplus.

Robinhood Chain is young, and so is this market. Yet the Pons flow made enough small pools for bots to run the same search hundreds of thousands of times.

Only seven Pons coins in every thousand reached the final trade set.

02 · The testHow a Pons trade entered the count

We began with every verified Pons v2 coin. We then looked for txs that bought and sold the same coin across at least two public pools.

The Pons curve did not count as a public pool. We removed those trades so the study would cover only cross-pool DEX arbitrage.

A trade then had to pass two checks. First, the bot had to get back every token it spent and finish with more of at least one token. Second, the dollar gain could not be larger than the sum put into the trade.

Those rules cut bad price reads and incomplete swaps. We used the same core check in our five-chain arbitrage study.

03 · The funnelThree million leads became 637,257 trades

Most Pons coins never reached the market needed for this kind of trade. Fewer than one in forty made it to two outside pools. Fewer still passed the price and balance checks.

The final set covered fewer than one coin in a hundred. Dead coins stayed in the launch count. That keeps the result from picking only the coins that survived.

04 · The moneyThe median trade booked fifty cents

The final set booked just under two and a half million dollars before the sender fee. The fee cut about one dollar in eighteen from the sum.

The median trade, the one in the middle when all trades are lined up, booked fifty cents before the fee. Almost all stayed above zero after that fee. Software can run a cheap loop many times, so a tiny gain can still be worth taking.

The cash sum is a flow measure. A bot can reuse the same funds in many txs. It should not be read as the amount that bots had locked at one time.

05 · The riseSeptember carried most of the total

The market was small through much of August. It rose fast at the start of September, then eased after the first week. The busiest day had more than fifty thousand trades. The top day by swap surplus came one day earlier.

Daily Pons token arbitragePriced trades · Aug 4 - Sep 15, 2026 UTC

The surge was wide enough to lift both count and dollars. It was still short. The peak passed within days, which is common in thin new pools once more bots find the same gap.

06 · The coinsTwenty tokens carried half the surplus

The spread across coins was steep. Shivolink led, with MUSHROOM in second place. The top five took close to a third of the full sum.

The ten Pons coins with the most swap surplusShared txs split equally across their Pons coins

When one tx crossed several Pons coins, we split its value between them for this table. That keeps the coin rows equal to the full sum.

07 · The poolsUniswap v4 sat at the center

Almost half the trades stayed within Uniswap v4 pools. Another two fifths crossed between v3 and v4. Together, those paths held nine in ten trades and nearly all swap surplus.

The same exchange can host an arbitrage trade when its pools quote the same coin at different prices. The price gap sits between pools, even when one DEX name appears on both sides.

08 · The traceThe largest swap gain was sent on

The largest tx in the final set booked more than eleven thousand dollars in swap surplus. The exact asset sums are shown below.

The raw sends add the part the swap table cannot show. The WETH was unwrapped, and the ETH then went to two other addresses. The tx passed every swap test, but the sender did not keep that whole sum.

This is why we call the result swap surplus. It is not a claim about wallet profit. A tx may include a loan payback, a direct tip, or a payment to another party after the swaps finish.

We ran the same check on the ten largest trades. Each swap sum matched the saved figure. Their transfer and call traces also showed flows outside the swaps.

09 · The limitsWhat the total leaves out

The headline covers the verified Pons v2 launch set. A possible older factory stayed out because we could not prove its link to Pons well enough for a public total.

Only ETH, WETH and the checked USDG coin could price a gain. Trades that finished with another coin stayed out of the dollar sum. Other trades failed the balance check. We did not count either group in the headline total.

Each day's median WETH/USDG DEX price gave us the dollar value of WETH. USDG was set to one dollar. We did not split trades by whether the coin had left its Pons curve at that moment.

Anyone can rerun the DEX side with Bitquery's DEX Trades API. The same raw stream is in Blockchain Data Streaming, and the queries can also be tested through the Bitquery MCP server.