What Is Pons? The Robinhood Chain Meme Coin Factory Token Up 18,000% Since July

Everyone in crypto is talking about PONS right now, the native token of the Pons app on the red-hot Robinhood Chain network—and the best performing one on the chain by far.

PONS is the token behind Pons, Robinhood Chain’s biggest meme coin factory—a launchpad that lets anyone create a coin built mostly around a joke or internet trend rather than any real product. If you’re already acquainted with the Pump.fun app on the Solana network, then this will feel very familiar.

The Robinhood Chain token was trading at $0.5978 on its Uniswap pool as of September 3, above a $430 million market capitalization, up 31.82% in 24 hours. And for early investors, a $1,000 bet on July 17, when PONS bottomed out at roughly $0.0033, would be worth about $181,000 today.

Pons works like a vending machine for new cryptocurrencies. Anyone can pick a name, a ticker and a picture, and the platform deploys a token with a fixed 1 billion supply straight into a trading pool—no code, no team allocation, no waiting. Pons never touches user funds; every launch and trade runs through the creator’s own wallet.

The platform runs exclusively on Robinhood Chain, a new blockchain network the trading app company Robinhood brought online on July 1. It’s a layer-2, meaning it processes transactions on its own faster, cheaper rail and settles the results back to Ethereum. Robinhood built the chain for tokenized stocks and DeFi apps, but meme coins have driven most of its early traffic.

Pons plays the same role on Robinhood Chain that Pump.fun plays on Solana: the default machine where traders go to launch and gamble on new tokens. Pons went live within days of Robinhood Chain’s mainnet, absorbing most of the activity after an early rival called Noxa abruptly stopped accepting new launches on July 11.

PONS itself started trading around July 15 at a fraction of a cent. It bottomed two days later, then rallied to $0.066 by July 27 as Pons became the chain’s busiest launchpad.

That first rally didn’t survive the competition. In early August, Uniswap—already Robinhood Chain’s default exchange—launched its own launchpad, Pools.trade, charging zero fees and quickly capturing half of all launchpad volume. The scare sent PONS crashing to about $0.016.

What pulled it back was tokenomics, not just the hype around Robinhood Chain and its flurry of activity. About 80% of Pons’s revenue funds an automatic buyback-and-burn: the platform uses trading fees to buy PONS on the open market and permanently destroy it, shrinking the supply. Roughly 29% of the original 1 billion tokens, some 288 million, have now been burned, leaving an effective supply near 712 million.

PONS broke out again through the back half of August, climbing from around $0.03 to a fresh high near $0.49 by the start of September.

Along the way it flipped CashCat—the chain’s flagship meme coin, named after the discarded “CashCat” brand Robinhood founders Vlad Tenev and Baiju Bhatt considered before naming their company—to become Robinhood Chain’s largest token by market cap.

Tenev has noticed the ecosystem too, telling podcaster Graham Stephan on the Iced Coffee Hour that on Robinhood Chain, “if you hold a meme coin, you just get stock tokens airdropped to you.”

Binance Wallet added PONS to its Alpha trading tier on September 2, and the token pushed to fresh highs the next day.

Pons the platform posted $5.95 million in daily fees on September 3—enough to rank fourth among all crypto protocols tracked by DefiLlama and briefly out-earn Robinhood Chain itself that day.

PONS now trades on Uniswap pools on Robinhood Chain alongside centralized listings on MEXC, Gate.io, KuCoin and Binance Alpha, plus futures on Hyperliquid, Bybit and Aster. Market cap estimates vary by tracker—from $392 million on DefiLlama to $576 million on OpenSea—a reminder of how thin and fast-moving the token’s on-chain liquidity still is.