On September 3, crypto KOL Rune revealed that Bonk Guy, the top trader on social trading platform fomo’s profit leaderboard, is now 64 years old. Positions shared by Bonk Guy show that he used only about $67,000 to buy PONS, the platform token of Robinhood Chain token launchpad Pons, and has seen an unrealized gain approaching 9,100%. Behind that position is a launchpad war that has unfolded on Robinhood Chain in recent months.

The 64-Year-Old Hunter Three years ago, Bonk Guy (@theunipcs) used $16,000 of capital and 6x leverage to go long BONK, at one point building an eight-figure unrealized profit before being fully liquidated in last October’s black-swan market event. This time he has returned to the top of the leaderboard through a group of Robinhood Chain tokens: PONS, USELESS, and Marscoin. By late August, the cumulative profit from his disclosed spot trades had exceeded $10 million, his profit over the preceding 30 days topped $5.7 million, and his account’s total holdings briefly reached $15.74 million.

His 9,100% gain came from capturing a self-reinforcing pricing mechanism on Robinhood Chain: PONS. How that mechanism works determines both how much he can earn and where the launchpad war may go next.

launchpad war may go next.

Pons

Pons is operated by Pons Labs. Every new token on the platform has a fixed supply of 1 billion, costs only 0.0005 ETH to create, and carries a 1% trading fee. Of that fee, 70% goes to the token creator and 30% to the protocol. Of the protocol’s share, 80% is used to buy back and burn PONS on the secondary market, while the remaining 20% is retained for team operations. This design ties “the frequency of new-token issuance and trading” to “PONS buybacks and burns”: the more tokens created and the more active their trading, the more fees are generated. A portion of those fees continuously becomes market buying pressure and burn volume for PONS, directly linking platform trading activity to PONS supply and demand.

With this mechanism, Pons caught the largest wave of traffic after first-mover platform NOXA paused new issuance in mid-July, and its share has expanded ever since. By early September, it accounted for roughly 66% of all issuance on the chain, while tokens newly issued through Pons generated 78% of the chain’s new-token trading volume. On September 3, Pons’s daily protocol fees surpassed Pump.fun and exceeded $6 million. Its PONS valuation subsequently reached an all-time high of roughly $970 million, rising more than 200% in a week; around 29% of total supply has now been repurchased and burned. After Pons launched V2 in August, new tokens can also trade in pairs with stock tokens such as Nvidia, Apple, and Robinhood once they complete the graduation stage.

LONG

Where Pons centers on cash-flow buybacks, LONG has bet on narrative from the beginning—directly binding stock tokens and memes into one product. LongX, launched in early September, packages a 3x leveraged Nvidia position into a token and opens trading pairs with meme tokens. Artificial Inu, the largest meme token on LONG by market capitalization, is paired with Nvidia stock tokens; its market capitalization once exceeded $200 million and its gains far outpaced Nvidia’s spot share price over the same period. Because it combines a leveraged stock position with meme-trading characteristics, its price plainly does not simply track the underlying equity: it is shaped by both leverage mechanics and on-chain speculative sentiment.

LONG has also designed a “community model”: part of fees is automatically burned and part is locked in a treasury, seeking to use capital accumulation to make stock-paired memes its differentiated label. Beyond Artificial Inu, memes paired with Costco, Micron, SpaceX, and other assets on LONG have reached market caps in the tens of millions of dollars and are competing for second place within the platform.

Pools

In early August, Uniswap Labs brought a launchpad directly to Robinhood Chain. On the day Pools launched, founder Hayden Adams publicly called high-take-rate launchpads “predatory,” implicitly targeting the 1% fee model used by platforms such as Pons. Pools takes the opposite approach: trading fees are only 0.25%; creators may choose to take 0.05%, while the remainder is automatically reinvested into permanently locked liquidity pools, with no additional launchpad fee. Tokens connect immediately to Uniswap’s web app, wallet, routing API, and third-party integrations including MetaMask and Ledger—meaning that a new token can be seen across the entire Uniswap ecosystem from issuance.

On launch day, Pools temporarily captured 40% to 50% of the chain’s issuance and trading share through official trust and distribution channels, creating a material challenge to Pons’s lead. Pons relies on first-mover advantage and the user stickiness created by its buyback mechanism; Pools relies on the reputation of the DeFi team behind it and lower fees. The two models are still colliding head-on.

Beyond these three, more than a dozen launchpads are active on Robinhood Chain, including PAIR, which focuses on stock-basket pairs; CLUTCH, focused on community and NFTs; Pools fun, which partners with Sushi; and developer-oriented Hood Dev. Each occupies a different niche.

If You Can’t Beat Them, Join Them?

On the day Pools launched in early August, it captured 40% to 50% of the chain’s issuance and trading volume with an imposing start. But the advantage did not last. By early September, Pons had regained the lead, with roughly 66% of issuance and 78% of new-token trading volume. Pools’s low fees and official distribution channels ultimately failed to meaningfully dislodge Pons’s leadership.

More interestingly, the competitive relationship had not ended, but Uniswap Labs’s role changed first.

On September 4, Uniswap Labs announced that it had purchased PONS, without disclosing the amount or size of the position. PONS rose roughly 40% within hours of the announcement.

On one side, Pools—launched by Uniswap Labs—is competing with Pons for Robinhood Chain’s launchpad gateway. On the other, Uniswap Labs has become an investor in PONS.

The market therefore began to read the investment as a dramatic verdict: if you can’t beat them, join them. But Uniswap Labs may not simply be interested in Pons as a competitor; it may be interested in the complete flywheel of issuance, trading, fees, and platform-token value capture that has already formed on Robinhood Chain. Pools can continue competing for the issuance gateway, while PONS lets Uniswap Labs simultaneously bet on the chain’s most successful concentration point for traffic.

The Expiry Date Behind the Excitement

Robinhood Chain’s launchpad war is fundamentally a fight for traffic.

Pons turns issuance and trading volume into buying pressure for PONS through fee buybacks. LONG binds stock tokens and memes together, seeking to turn price volatility in traditional assets into new speculative targets. Pools bets on low fees and Uniswap’s distribution reach. The three mechanisms look different, but they are currently competing for the same group of users.

Robinhood Chain’s data make that clear: as of August 10, about 92.9% of accounts had interacted only with meme coins, while only around 3.7% had used tokenized stocks alone. Robinhood Chain aims to be on-chain finance, but what has taken off first is still a meme craze.

That is also the real risk for platform tokens such as Pons and LONG. Their gains today are not just a bet that one launchpad will win. They are a bet that meme trading on Robinhood Chain can keep growing. More issuance and more frequent trading strengthen Pons’s fee buybacks; more meme capital entering stock-pair trading expands LONG’s narrative runway.

The problem is that all these flywheels rest on the same premise: on-chain speculative enthusiasm cannot stop.

Robinhood’s 90-day gas subsidy for some wallets will expire at the end of September. After the subsidy disappears, how much of today’s DEX volume—now in the billions of dollars—will remain? Will fee revenue at launchpads dependent on meme traffic fall quickly? And will users who entered Robinhood Chain for the wealth effects of Pons, LONG, and similar tokens actually stay to use lending, stock tokens, and other on-chain financial products?

That is the real dividing line in this launchpad war.

If traffic leaves along with the meme frenzy, then what Pons, LONG, Pools, and others are competing for is simply a larger share of one speculative cycle. But if these platforms can truly retain meme users and gradually steer them toward lending, stock tokens, and other on-chain financial services, then the fight is no longer over the rise and fall of a platform token—it is over control of Robinhood Chain’s next financial gateway.

This content is for reference only and does not constitute investment advice. Markets involve risk; invest with caution.